I just bought an Ashdown Superfly on ebay as a backup bass head unit. Here’s a quick “first impressions” review.
I looked at the Little Giant range from Ashdown (either 350 or 1000 watt models available)
but settled on the Superfly as that was the first thing that came up on ebay at a reasonable price.
The Ashdown is a programmable 2 x 250 watt (into 2 x 4 Ohm cabinets) solid state bass head. That could be a bit of a problem for some people, as you need to have two cabinets to get the full 500 watts available. If you only have one 4 Ohm cabinet, then you’ll only get 250 watts. If you only have one 8 Ohm cabinet, you’ll get less power than that ….. something like 160 watts.
That brings up my first issue with the Ashdown.
It’s not as loud as I hoped it might be. I ran it through my 4 Ohm 1 x 15 bass cabinet to get 250 watts. I would question whether this would be loud enough for anything other than the smallest of pub gigs. I then took the second speaker output and attached it to the 2 x 10 cabinet within my Marshall MB4210 (the speaker connection options in the Marshall allow you to do that). This upped the game somewhat. It’s still not the loudest amp I’ve ever heard, but, in two cabinet mode, is certainly loud enough for small to medium pub gigs. Mind you, I had to run the output volume knob very high (up at 9 or 10) to get what I wanted. So, be careful, you might have problems with getting enough volume.
Secondly, when I ran the head through my Marshall 1 x 15 cabinet, I immediately noticed an annoying high pitched whine coming from the cabinet.
Lots of people have reported that issue. Luckily, my 1 x 15 has a switch to turn the tweeter off. I did that and the noise immediately disappeared. Problem with that is that you lose the benefits of having a tweeter – and you lose some of the “highs” that the tweeter in the 1 x 15 can provide. A quick fiddle with the onboard graphic equalizer compensated for that. That might be a problem if you can’t switch off your tweeter.
Once all of that was sorted, I got around to playing with the unit to see what kind of sounds I could get out of it. The unit has all the inputs and outputs that you need. It has 10 preset sounds and you can create and store another 89 in the memory. In short, it sounds good.
Nice, rich, warm tones can be had from this unit and you can get a wide variety of sounds from it. I haven’t really been able to get much in the way of distorted sounds from the amp – not in the way that I can get from my Marshall. Although, I do use a Line 6 X3 Live floorboard pre amp, so I can do what I want with that. If you want distortion (even just a little bit of rasp) then you’ll need a pre amp or an effects pedal.
I have heard tales that these Superfly units can run very hot.
This is something I looked for very carefully in the couple of hours or so that I used it. Seemed okay to me. In fact, I would say it was positively cool in operation!
So, in short,
this is a very small and compact amp (it also comes with its own soft case with shoulder strap) which could be used as a backup amp for small to medium gigs. Not especially loud and probably only loud enough for very small gigs unless you own two 4 Ohm cabinets – in which case it will be okay for small (ish) pub gigs but may struggle on larger ones. Nice range of sounds, but you will need an effects pedal or pre amp if you want even the smallest amount of distortion. It will do for me, for now, but I may look elsewhere in the not too distant future. Maybe one of the later Ashdown Little Giant’s might be an option – but I will try before I buy and I will probably only consider the 1000 watt version, as these Ashdown watts appear to be smaller than Marshall’s.
