NAD: Get the Raid, we have an Ant.

After 3 weeks, waiting for this to ship direct from Ashdown it finally arrived!



I had been looking at the Ant to replace my AG500 because I was simply tired of making 3 trips from the car for loading rehearsals or shows. My band's rehearsal space is shared with the drummer's main project, so we have to load in and out for each rehearsal. We're happy to do so since they aren't charging us for the time in there. So naturally I started thinking, what if I could condense my amp and pedalboard together?

I looked at a few solutions: Quilter Interbass, Seymour Duncan Powerstage 170, and the Ant. The Ant wound up winning out due to wattage and a sale direct from Ashdown mid-May which knocked 10% and had only $10 international shipping. It's not the smallest out of the three but it will fit on whatever pedalboard I wind up grabbing.


Sooooo... How does it sound/work? Flat. It's very flat right out of the box. EQ at noon sounds very clean with no really discernable flavor. It may not be flat via if ran through frequency analyzers and pink noise, but as a pedal platform for the HX Stomp, it sounds faithful to what I've dialed in headphones, with the added flavor of my SVT112AVs.



The only weird part - The amp models of the HX Stomp I had dialed didn't work perfectly when paired with the Ant. They were all very bright and thin. So I wound up changing the blocks to preamp models instead and reset knobs where they were prior. Now they sounded like solid amps. I'm betting that the power amp emulations didn't pair well with the internal pre/power of the Ant itself. It's entirely possible that by reducing the master volume they would clean up and sound better, but ultimately I have the sound and signal routing worked out how I hoped!

My wife and I have a 2 week old newborn, so I'm unable to really push it and test its volume, but I'm hoping to have rehearsals start up again in the next couple weeks. For the time being, I'm really impressed with how loud and how good it sounds. I'm struggling to see a gig where this setup and my 2 1x12's don't work.

 

Thank you! Quarantine under COVID hasn't been all bad for us, it's great to have forced paternity leave and time to work on music. I'm itching to get back to the real world and play some gigs and go back to work however. The Ant only enhances that desire.

Thank you!

 

I love it still. I got it dialed right where I wanted and came to understand the max output and gain structure. Generally I run it on the passive input and with a single SVT112av the volume sits about 1pm and keeps up in rehearsal with a moderate drummer, two guitarists running a Deluxe Reverb and Princeton respectively. We just did a live set the other day at "normal" gig volume and I brought both cabs. No volume issues with the volume pushed to about 2pm on the dial.

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I mounted it on a Mono small pedalboard along with some other utilities. If you're running a preamp pedal or modeling unit it's excellent, if you want full range uncolored bass sound direct into some cabs it's execellent as well. I really can't envision replacing it unless it fails, but Ashdown provides a 5 year warranty on it. Maybe if they do a scaled up version with some fancy routing and a little more power, but that's just my greed talking

 

I would agree! I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't pair well with Sansamps, Tone Hammers, Helixes, or the other variety of amp model and preamp pedals.

I was really pleasantly surprised with this. I only had speak-on cables at first, but wound up taking 1/4" at a gig and had a slight panic until I tried to put it in