Bergantino B|Amp MKII Bass Amplifier
800-Watt Solid State Bass Guitar Amplifier Head. Made in the USA.
Description & Specs
In late 2015, Bergantino Audio Systems founder and head engineer Jim Bergantino launched the original B|Amp. This award-winning, ground-breaking and revolutionary bass amplifier broke the mold, winning a host of awards and accolades, not only from the industry, but from the bass playing community worldwide.
With the B|Amp Mk2, this updated model gives the modern bassist even more tools for their sonic armory. Time never stands still, so Jim has taken all the goodness from the original B|Amp design and brought it forward, not only updating its look with a gorgeous new OLED screen, but also adding new and powerful features in the process, based on players’ feedback and suggestions.
Perfect for the studio, rehearsing at home, recording or playing live, the highly-advanced B|Amp Mk2 is incredibly flexible and delivers maximum performance in a lightweight, compact, yet intuitive package. Truly a chameleon in the world of bass amplification, it is more than suitable for electric, electronic and amplified acoustic bass tones and works great in any genre of music.
Mk 2 New Features:
New ultra-crisp and easy-to-read OLED display
User choice of serial and parallel compressor (scene savable)
Added clean/dirty blend percentage for drive effects (scene savable)
Drive Me Wild
Want some soft-clip purr added to your fundamental tone? How about searing distortion or gritty fuzz that sounds like a big tube amp is about to blow up? With our Big Fat Tube (BFT) drive circuits, all of that is at your fingertips. Also, don’t worry about losing your low end or foundational tone, we’ve made sure that will never happen.
By adding a clean/dirty blend screen, YOU control how much drive you want mixed into your signal. Don’t worry though, even at 100% full drive, people will know who the bass player is.
Overdrive adds harmonic texture to the circuit, extending the voicing of the B|Amp Mk2 closer to the tone of a tube amplifier. The Distortion 1 setting is voiced like a tube amplifier driven into clipping, while the Distortion 2 mode recreates a harder-hitting tone, reminiscent of some of the classic pedals we all love.
Any of the three distinct drive tones can be used globally or easily saved in the memory settings.
Compress Not Depress
The built-in proprietary Bergantino Variable Ratio Compressor (VRC™) was designed to take into consideration the compression needs of today’s bass players and simply take the mystique out of compression to give you a better tone. We know of no other off the shelf compressor available today which can do what the VRC can do and with such ease of use.
With most of the currently available compressors on the market, you have to settle for a fixed compression ratio which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to find the sweet spot between finger style and the more dynamic needs of such playing styles as popping and slapping. Choosing a ratio which evens out the dynamics and thickens the notes for finger style playing will not eliminate or curtail large transients that can be created by slap or pop styles. On the other hand, a compression ratio chosen for countering large dynamic swings will typically squash the dynamics and musicality of regular finger style playing.
Using Bergantino’s VRC, the compression ratio will change dynamically, essentially adjusting itself to the style and needs of your playing. Set up properly, it will give the player a nice, even and thick fingerstyle tone while attacking those large, over the top transients, all without even having to turn a knob!
In B|AMP Mk2, VRC now comes with two options: Parallel and Series.
In Parallel mode, 50% of the signal passes through the compressor and then sums with the unaffected signal, adding a very pleasing sound and feel. With the Parallel compressor engaged, players can expect more of a note thickening that adds weight and smoothness to your tone. Conversely, our Serial compressor takes 100% of your bass signal and passes it through. This gives a more traditional compression of your bass tone allowing for a more affected sound, popular for many styles of playing.
Speaker Profiles
One of the many features that makes the B|Amp platform unique, is that it considers and includes the response of connected speaker cabinets as part of the amplification signal path. This is a completely new approach to bass amplification and is accomplished through Bergantino’s proprietary “Profile EQ System”.
No other bass amplifier on the market has the ability to manage speaker and the overall system performance like the B|Amp Mk2, while at the same time uphold the utmost fidelity we crave with all our designs. Our approach to bass amplification is to give you, the player a blank canvas to create your tone, rather than be forced into a manufacturers insistence on how you should sound.
As a long-time speaker designer, Jim is well aware of the lumpy frequency response of the average bass cabinet out there. Many musicians try and use the simple EQ of an amplifier to correct their tone, whereas in fact what they are doing is actually trying to correct these anomalies to give a flatter response.
So, we decided to do something much more useful, by allowing you to mitigate issues by closer matching the amp with the cabinet(s). In order to achieve this flatness, the frequency response of a given speaker cabinet must be known. With a complex counteracting EQ curve, the various dips and peaks can then be applied to a signal.
When shipped from the factory, the amp is loaded with a general-purpose profile that should suit pretty much any standard cabinet design out there. But to make this really simple and effective, we have made extremely accurate measurements for most of our own cabinet designs and configurations and you can download these specific Profiles directly from the Bergantino website. Profiles are then easily loaded to the B|Amp Mk2 via the front USB port and a standard FAT32 thumb drive.
DSP Embedded System Controlled Bass Amplifier
800W RMS output (@ 2.67/2 Ω), 700W RMS (@ 4Ω), 350W RMS (@ 8Ω)
Software Speaker impedance matching for optimal power transfer
4-Band Multifunction EQ with adjustable frequency range and “Q”
Revolutionary Bergantino Speaker Profile EQ System
Programmable Filters: Bright Switch, Variable High-Pass Filter, Variable Low-Pass Filter, Variable Feedback filter
Built in Chromatic Tuner
On-Board Variable-Ratio Compressor (VRC)
M Big Fat Tube (BFT) drive circuits – Overdrive, Distortion 1 or Distortion 2 (Fuzz)
User Programmable Memory Settings
Auxiliary Input and Headphone jacks – for personal monitor and practice use
Effects send and return loop
Dual Speakon Outputs
Studio-Quality DI – Software selectable Pre or Post EQ
Line Output – Pre-amp
Selectable Phase Output (Normal or Reverse)
USB port: allows software upgrades/profiles, wireless footswitch connectivity (optional) and portable device charging
