Yesterday morning I arrived at church for my weekly Sunday morning gig when to my dismay I discovered that the building had been broken into. Among the items stolen was my bass amp: a Fender Bassman 150 combo. The mental anguish and turmoil this caused is not the topic of this thread, so I will spare you those details.
I was more than satisfied with my old amp, so my first thought was to just buy the exact same model as a replacement. Last night I discovered that Fender no longer makes this model, which complicates things.
I am not exclusively a bass player. One of the things I loved about the Bassman 150 was how flexible it was. It included a high frequency horn, and sounded pretty decent as a full range amp. In addition to playing my bass through it, I also often used it as an acoustic guitar amp and a keyboard amp. I've even used it as the PA for a few small coffee house gigs where I ran the output from the mixer into the RCA inputs on the back of the amp. It was a great "jack of all trades" tool, and I will miss it dearly. Ideally I would have multiple amps to handle each of these situations, but right now that's beyond my budget.
So, I am in need of finding a replacement amp that would offer me similar performance/flexibility. The specs on the Bassman 150 can be seen here:
Fender Bassman 150 | Sweetwater.com
The primary items on my wish list are as follows:
- Punchy sound for bass. Most often I find my ear drawn to 12" speakers, although I'm not married to the speaker size if it sounds good.
- Portablity. I have to haul this amp around frequently, so the more portable the better.
- Decent full range performance. Most likely would mean having a high frequency horn. For reasons mentioned above.
- Line out. Given the fact that it's a combo, it's nice in larger venues to have the option to send a direct signal to the PA.
- Mute switch. When running my acoustic guitar, having a way to quick mute the amp is invaluable.
- Roughly in the range of $400. That's about what my Fender cost 5 years ago.
Unfortunately, I live in a small market which means I don't have the opportunity to just go out and test a bunch of amps. We have two main music stores: a small GC and a local store where I do most of my business. On average, these stores each keep maybe 5 bass amps in stock. My local store can order about anything, however before I commit to purchasing an amp without hearing it I like to at least gather some opinions of some people more knowledgeable than I and perhaps have some personal experience with a particular amp.
Sorry about the length of this. I tend to be verbose. And thank you in advance for everyone's time.
Replacement Combo Amp Advice Needed 
