Ashdown CTM-30 "Little Stubby" Owners Input Needed

I parted with my CTM-30, though it was a very sweet little amp with a lot of grunt. There's not a lot of mystery in the tone stack for the players that understand it, but one day I just got fed up working with the EQ and I decided that was enough. In addition, I would rather have a variable gain knob for the pre-amp, which this one lacks.

 

Not really sure if the drive knob is the de facto gain, so I may be wrong about that. BTW, have you looked at the new Traynor tube amp with the small footprint?

 

@OldFunBass

I have the big Ashdown CTM-300
It is amazing...fantastic amp
I have been using Ashdown since late 1998

Hopefully @Wasnex sees this thread
He knows heaps about Ashdown valve amps. A very helpful contributor to this site.

 

Yes I have a CTM300 as well as a 427 Small Block.

I haven't played the LB30, CTM30 or Little Stubby, but I believe they are voiced closer to my 427 than the CTM300. The 427 was part of the Dual Tube series and has the same cosmetics as the LB30. They were both available at the same time. The CTM300 preamp actually looks very similar, but is voiced quite different and uses 12DW7 tubes instead of 12AX7 (ECC83S). The LB30 and CTM30 are essentially the exact some amp, but the cosmetics are different as the Dual Tube line had been discontinued with the CTM30 came out. The Little Stubby has some circuit revisions from the CTM30.

 

I don't know for sure, but I think the Little Stubby is just the same circuit as the LB30 and CTM30 with a few tweaks to expand the feature set and improve performance. I believe the voicing of all three amps is fairly similar but the Little Stubby is more adjustable, and also I get the impression the tone controls work a bit better on the Little Stubby. Ashdown tone controls tend to be quirky in my experience.

The Little Stubby is well reviewed from everything I have read, and the smaller form factor is definitely nice. I am somewhat suspicious of the horizontal tube placement needed for the small form factor though. My impression is EL84s are not the most mechanically rugged tubes to begin with, so I have to wonder if the horizontal orientation of the tubes will reduce their service life.

I don't have any actual reliability data, and I don't see much on the internet to indicate the amp has reliability problems.

 

Here's a demo.

 

Not having played any of these, I don’t have much to add.

However, I was looking at The Traynor website last week.
YBA100 – Traynor Amps

 

that sounds great to me

 

You must mean the original CTM30, rather than the Little Stubby version? The CTM30 is a non-master volume amp. The Lil Stubby has input gain, labeled "Drive", and also a master volume, labeled "Volume," so it's a bit more flexible.

I totally get what you mean about Ashdown tone controls, they can be really quirky and frustrating IMHO. I have read comments that the tone controls on the Little Stubby are a bit more intuitive than on the CTM30 and LB30; hopefully that's correct. MY CTM300 really drove me nuts for a few months. FYI, The Little Stubby does not have the Mid-Shift, Bass-Shift, or Bright Switch found on the earlier amps.

 

So right, my experience is with the earlier Little Bastard.

 

I admit that I have been tempted by these low powered amps, but my collection is more about the other end of the wattage spectrum. If for some reason I need a low powered amp, I have a vintage Princeton at 12.5W and a JMI era Vox AC30, and both sound fabulous with bass. Ultra compact is not really a concern for me.

As far as stackability. The Little Stubby does look really modular since it's nice and squared off, but I would not recommend stacking stuff on top of it. I wouldn't want to scratch up the case, and there is a big vent on top designed to allow heat from the tubes to escape.

One advantage that Ampeg PF50T and PF20T have over the Ashdowns is a built in dummy load. This means you can run them without a speaker. They have balanced outputs that are taken right of the output transformer, so you get your "tubey" sound for silent recording...or perhaps you like to run your amp into a small mixer and use headphones and a media player to practice.

I suspect the Ashdown and Ampeg offerings sound quite different. The best advice is try them all out and pick the one that you think sounds best. Unfortunately that is not always possible .

 

I don’t think there are a lot of owners of the Little Stubby here yet, so you might not get many responses.

I have owned an LB-30 for about 5 years now, the build quality and reliability are top notch. It handles tube rolling very well also. I would imagine the Little Stubby would be the same, and if I needed another low wattage tube amp I sure wouldn’t hesitate to grab one.

I know that doesn’t help much, sorry.

 

I own both CTM300 and a CTM30. I've not had any difficulty working with the tone stack, but I can see how some might be frustrated by it. I really miss the pre-gain in the 30, but I believe this was rectified in the stubby. I bought the 30 on a whim. I still have it, which is a testament to how it performs as a low-power tube amp.

 

The trick I eventually learned with the CTM300 is start with the tone controls around 9:00 and keep them within +/- 2 clock face hour settings. Within that range, the Bass and Mid control are intuitive and there is a wide variety of sounds you can dial in. Outside of the proposed range, the results can be unpredictable and confounding.

Quirks: The Bass control seems to max out around 10:00. Then, if you turn the Mid control much above about 11:00 it swamps the Bass and Treble control, meaning they have no effect. The Treble control doesn't do much if you have the Bass and Mid turned up, except it actually seems to work backwards somewhat as the clearest highs seem to be with the Treble all the way down. As the Treble control is turned CW, there is slight boost in the low mids and then it starts sucking sub lows out. So basically by the time you start getting a boost in the high mids and treble, you are also loosing low end. If you turn the Mids all the way down, then the Treble works a bit more like you would expect, except it effects mids more the treble. So it's sort of like the amp has two mid range controls that don't really work well together. If you turn the Bass and Mid controls all the way down, and just turn up the Treble, there is a surprising amount of bass.

The position of the various push buttons have quite a bit of impact on how the amp sounds and how effective the rotary controls are.

Aside from the quirky EQ, it's a really fabulous amp that gets loud and is capable of a wide variety of sounds. Although this is essentially a variation of a Fender tone stack, it has some baked voicing that makes it sound sort of mid forward to me.

I think it should be said that the tone stack was intentionally designed so the controls are extremely interactive with one another. Fender setup his tones stacks so they were a lot more intuitive and well behaved. The trade offs for predictability are the voicing is different and perhaps not as many sounds are possible.

I believe the LB30/CTM30 sound more like a Fender, and are a bit more intuitive. Supposedly the Little Stubby tone stack is even better behaved. None of them have the CTM300s unique voicing, which you may love or hate. If you are interested in less power, the CTM100 has the same preamp design as the CTM300.

 

Never even seen the other models, I've only played the LB in a friend's rehearsal room. If you're after that old school tube sound, it has it in spades. Definitely not a "flat" sounding amp. 30 watts is freaking loud, too. Paired with the right cab, I could easily do bar gigs with it.

 

Here are my thoughts on the Little Stubby versus the Ampegs that I recently wrote elsewhere:

NAD! Little Stubby PROTOTYPE - all tube

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