While Max was at NAMM he took a bunch of photos (with more coming on the way), and when he saw the above little 15-watt offering from Ashdown Engineering, he snapped a photo and purposely put his sunglasses on top of it just to give you an idea of how small this thing is.
The entire spec sheet on the CTM15 is right here, but what you need to know up front is that yes, it is a true all-tube bass amp head, it is 15 watts RMS, it does have a rugged housing (meaning it does have a properly-made cage and chassis), and of course it has that oh-so awesome VU meter on it.
Small note before continuing: This is one of three CTM bass amp heads Ashdown offers. The other two are the CTM100 and the large-and-in-charge CTM300.
Actual dimensions of the CTM are 140x235x155 mm. For those that don’t feel like doing the math in statute measurements, that’s roughly 5.5×9.25×6.1 inches. Yeah, it’s small.
Remember, those 15 watts are tube watts, meaning it can belt out some good sound.
We’re interested to know what you think about this little amp (even if you haven’t tried it), so please feel free to express your opinion by posting a comment or two.
Ashdown also very recently put out a demo video on this amp head, so feel free to check it out below.
That little think sounds pretty good. Might have to test one out when they get some locally.
looks great, bet it packs a punch !!!
Awesome tone! I’d like to try one myself. I’ve been searching for a small tube amp for studio work. This one seems to be good enough.
It would be fun to drop the gain and crank the volume to get the output tubes to distort. The 12AX7 will tend to add the more treble distortion bite. It would be fun to put it through a 15 and try and get that Morphine tone.
My current practice/recording head is a retubed Epiphone Valve Jr…an earth-shaking 5 watts. I’d be all over this head right now, if I could afford to do an impulse buy. I WILL be checking one out down the road, guaranteed.
I’m interested in buying one as soon as I can find someone who has one for sale.
I have a Little Bastard, and it sounded great. Replaced the cheap Ruby tubes it shipped with with some sweet NOS tubes, and it went from great to unbelievable. Going to get a CTM-15, too, as soon as I can find one!