ebagjones
New member
So last night I published a gushing NPD and and today I really got to put a new amp through the paces and I am having the exact opposite of that NPD feeling. I will just keep this as objective as possible, because I understand so much about gear is subjective, but I want people to go into this eyes wide open if they decide to move forward. There is not much information out there on this relatively new series and I wish I had known some of this prior to making a purchase.
The amp in question is the Ashdown AGM-30 OS. A guitar amp made by their UK custom shop, and designed to capture the sound of 60s and 70s British amps, one look at the black tolex, gold face plate, and white piping, and we are fully aware of the sound they are going for. It is a 30 watt 2 channel amp with an effects loop running on 4 EL84 tubes.
Let’s start off with some pros…
- Nice look to the head
- Does a pretty decent job at capturing plexi tones and can go much higher gain without losing its vintage tonality.
Now that that is out of the way, here are my quibbles…
- “Clean” setting are useless. And not in the normal low headroom way you’d expect from a M-style rock amp. The problem is the bass. Good god I’ve never heard anything like this. At moderate settings, say around 9 o clock on the dial, and a single coil bridge pickup, with gain only at about 8:30 and the master volume decently up, it has so much bass that my 212 cab shakes the head when hitting the low E string. I mean it might shake it off. It is physically moving it. It’s also clearly pushing the power section too hard and starting to fart out on the low notes despite the moderate volume. Strumming a chord you can barely hear anything but the lowest two strings. If you roll it off all the way it’s semi-usable, but I would say the bass control on 0 if roughly comparable to my other amps’ bass control on 8 or 8.5.
- Buttons are crooked and not flush with one another. It has several switches to engage boost, or cascading gain, and they are all sticking out very obviously different amounts and some are slightly crooked in relation to one another.
- Loud. I can’t stress how loud this is. Every other amp I own is at least 50 watts and several are 100. This amp, on about 8:30 on the volume dial is louder than any other amp I’ve ever played. For S&G, I went ahead and dimed it since it was basically causing hearing damage at its lowest settings, and…. Nothing changed much. Definitely added a bit of gain, but maybe 5-10% louder. Which tells me 90% of the volume taper occurs ***before you get to 9 o clock on the dial***. Absolutely wild.
- Last and definitely least, it’s capacity as a 2 channel amp is useless. The higher gain settings require the cascade settings with higher gain settings on both gain channels. So if you want to switch from a distorted setting to a clean one you need to
A) roll down the channel gain back to about 8 or 9 o clock
B) roll the bass back down from wherever it is set to off
C) press the cascade switch
D) press the channel and boost switches and
E) if you want more American sounding cleans, press the tone switch
Of these, only channel and boost are able to be activated from foot switch.
To summarize, I tried to stay away from subjective feelings I have toward this amp and give some real problematic design elements I think perspective buyers should be aware of. For me, even if this was the best amp I’d heard, they would be a dealbreaker, as, IMO, it manages to make a 2 channel ostensibly modern design more problematic than a single channel vintage one.
The amp in question is the Ashdown AGM-30 OS. A guitar amp made by their UK custom shop, and designed to capture the sound of 60s and 70s British amps, one look at the black tolex, gold face plate, and white piping, and we are fully aware of the sound they are going for. It is a 30 watt 2 channel amp with an effects loop running on 4 EL84 tubes.
Let’s start off with some pros…
- Nice look to the head
- Does a pretty decent job at capturing plexi tones and can go much higher gain without losing its vintage tonality.
Now that that is out of the way, here are my quibbles…
- “Clean” setting are useless. And not in the normal low headroom way you’d expect from a M-style rock amp. The problem is the bass. Good god I’ve never heard anything like this. At moderate settings, say around 9 o clock on the dial, and a single coil bridge pickup, with gain only at about 8:30 and the master volume decently up, it has so much bass that my 212 cab shakes the head when hitting the low E string. I mean it might shake it off. It is physically moving it. It’s also clearly pushing the power section too hard and starting to fart out on the low notes despite the moderate volume. Strumming a chord you can barely hear anything but the lowest two strings. If you roll it off all the way it’s semi-usable, but I would say the bass control on 0 if roughly comparable to my other amps’ bass control on 8 or 8.5.
- Buttons are crooked and not flush with one another. It has several switches to engage boost, or cascading gain, and they are all sticking out very obviously different amounts and some are slightly crooked in relation to one another.
- Loud. I can’t stress how loud this is. Every other amp I own is at least 50 watts and several are 100. This amp, on about 8:30 on the volume dial is louder than any other amp I’ve ever played. For S&G, I went ahead and dimed it since it was basically causing hearing damage at its lowest settings, and…. Nothing changed much. Definitely added a bit of gain, but maybe 5-10% louder. Which tells me 90% of the volume taper occurs ***before you get to 9 o clock on the dial***. Absolutely wild.
- Last and definitely least, it’s capacity as a 2 channel amp is useless. The higher gain settings require the cascade settings with higher gain settings on both gain channels. So if you want to switch from a distorted setting to a clean one you need to
A) roll down the channel gain back to about 8 or 9 o clock
B) roll the bass back down from wherever it is set to off
C) press the cascade switch
D) press the channel and boost switches and
E) if you want more American sounding cleans, press the tone switch
Of these, only channel and boost are able to be activated from foot switch.
To summarize, I tried to stay away from subjective feelings I have toward this amp and give some real problematic design elements I think perspective buyers should be aware of. For me, even if this was the best amp I’d heard, they would be a dealbreaker, as, IMO, it manages to make a 2 channel ostensibly modern design more problematic than a single channel vintage one.
