ADA B200s

it's pretty old and rusty, i bought it used.
i always wanted to go solid state but didn't find any power amp what is good enough compared to a tube amp.
power switch, 2 volume pots, two ins, two outs. simple as hell.

i use it with a tech21 psa-1 preamp and a line6 flextone cab.
i had a brunetti rockit preamp which is a hybrid one and i tried the psa-1 with a really cheap slovakian amp too. i have a mesa 50/50 but i put the ada in my rack.
1. mesa 50/50
2. ada b200s
3. brunetti rockit
4. slovakian miracle, hehe
for the money the ada b200s is really great.

if mesa is 10 i'll give 8.

never played with it. this saturday we gonna gig. i hope there won't be problems.

i don't know, never e-mailed them.

it's the best solid state amp i've ever tried for guitar.
my mesa 50/50 sounds better but i don't want to carry it because it's weight and the tubes.

A simple a it can be. A left and right volume knob. Two 1/4" in and two 1/4" out. A grounded power plug in the back for you preamp etc.

The best part about this amp is it is 16 Lbs!!!

It will not act like a toaster when it comes to heat. It runs cool. Its very easy on the wall power. You wont blow as any club power out lets. :-)

What you put in it is exactly what comes out. It is a exact replication of your preamp. No coloration or hype of the sound.

I bought it while my Marshall 9200 was in the repair shop to get me through a few gigs. Not only is as loud as the 9200 but it sounds as good and is ONLY 16 Lbs!! The Marshall is going up on eBay! Now I can lift my rack with one hand. :-) The Marshall 9200 is 76 Lbs or 34.5 kg. The ADA B200 S is 16Lbs. Thats 60 Lbs taken out of the rack!
I have had a Marshall 9100 and 9200, Carvin T100, Tubeworks MosValve and the ADA B200S. The ADA is the winner in my opinion due to sound, power, weight and efficiency on AC power.

Its built like it was made to be on the road 24/7. A truely solid unit. No maintenance required!

None. History

I will be buying a second one as a spare just because the are getting hard to fine and a great value for the money.

Its a power amp by ADA. Nothing fancy, like explained before, but it does get the loudest jobs done! 2 channels, a power switch, and 2 volume pots. 100+ watts per side @ 4ohms! Simple and deadly.

FWIW, I modified the unit somewhat. Basically all I did was to remove the entire guts out of the chassis so I can use this amp for the power section in a homemade guitar head that I built. Also, I completely bypassed the volume control circuitry, giving the amp the "If its ON, its DAMN LOUD. When its OFF, it's QUIET" quality for my application. I now use the Output Volume control from the preamp section (an MP-1 also modified to fit in the head, as well as having a badass tone signature mod)of the head to have complete control over the insanity.

Brutally loud! Can't bridge this amp, but who the heck would even WANT to for crissake. No tubes in this, all solid state BiPolar design. Not very noisy at all. When I first got this, I tried it in place of my Rocktron Velocity 300 power amp with the rest of my rack. I wasn't impressed at all, really. But then I tried it with just an ADA MP-1 preamp (in the head I built), with no effects units or anything, and then this sucker seemed to come ALIVE! Wow, this "bare bones" approach worked out way better. The sound is pretty crisp and tight too.

There's not a lot to this unit. Very minimal circuitry inside, and seems to be durable. If something does go wrong inside, it'd be a snap to get it back on track. Man, you should've SEEN the flash when I discharged the caps inside! It looked like a nuclear strike! My eyes wasn't the same for a day or so after that. So yeah, I think this thing has some pretty good reliability. Obviously, you shouldn't throw it down the stairs or run it over with a truck. And as long as you make sure your speaker impedances are matched, this thing should take whatever you can sonically dish out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah....ADA is gone. The King is dead, Long live the King. There are a few (maybe only just one worth checking out though.....www.adadepot.com) websites for support of ADA products. Most repair shops I've seen that have broken ADA stuff on hand to fix, never fix them. Thats Ok, because I've stopped taking broken gear into shops a long time ago. I usually find a way to fix the stuff myself!

In a contest between the Rocktron Velocity 300 and the ADA B200s, the Velocity is going to kick the crap out of the B200s every time. But the B200s does what it is intended to do (nothing more, nothing less) and does it without question. No whimpering or whining comes from it when I want to piss off the neighbors with the sheer volume that it can deliver. If I don't want to lug around the whole rack system I have with the 2 Marshall 4x12 cabs, then I just bring the head and one cab, and that's more than enough to get the job done!

Is it crazy to build my own amp head in this fashion? Well, ADA didn't make one but probably should've, and I got one and you don't! lol If you want to do this too, its both easier and harder than it sounds to do. But if you have a B200s to use, and a great preamp to go with it (like the MP-1) it WILL be brutal! 'Nuff said, I have neighbors to piss off......and time's a-wastin'.

2 channel solid state 100 watts per channel @ 8ohms.
Pretty bear bones.

Just got it, so I have not had a chance to explore all the possiblities. I would say start out with a nice tube preamp and go from there. This baby has plenty of power and does shake the house.

So Far So Good

I think they are out of business.

Cheap. Plenty of power! But you'll need a decent Tube Preamp to get you going.

This is a simple guitar power amp with two independent, clean 100 w channels.
It is not supposed to offer anything else but sheer volume. The amp's a very sparse two unit thingy, it has an on/off-switch and two volume pots, one for each channel. I play mostly extreme metal through a Marshall 1960 4x12 and use differing preamps depending on the mood I'm in (or the style of music, sometimes we just chill by playing surf, reggae or free jazz) and it has always provided enough power for me (and boy does our drummer hit hard). We've even recorded some distorted bass with this amp into a 15" cab. Last week we fed that setup with a triggered bassdrum signal that sounded like a nuclear bomb, and it worked admirably. So to conclude, this amp has no features at all, but it does what it is meant to do, amplify, and it does it well.

This amp doesn't color the sound the least, which is great. the only downside is that I have to use it with american-to-european transformer which adds a little noise, thus a 9.

This thing is built like a goddamn panzerwagen. You could probably ram it with a truck and it would be functional.

Well, the company went out of business years ago so I'm in a bind as I'm in dire need of the schematics so that I can fit this thing with a european transformer. Any assistance concerning this matter would be greatly appreciated

I've been playing for about seven years, me and my buddies run a 16-track studio so we have quite a lot of gear.
Thanks to this amp, I managed to get rid of a combo that wasn't really suited for me and since this is a two-channel affair, both me and our second guitar-player can play through the same amp into our own 4x12s. For the price this has really been of fantastic value, the transformer noise is no bother since I've got a Hush-system. If you see one of these for a bargain-price and are in need of a clean, powerful, sturdily built amp, I'd give it some consideration, and if anyone has the schematics, please don't hesitate to contact me.

This is a stereo bipolar power amp. Features are irrelevant.

It is very clean and loud. 100 watts per side all solid state.

It is broken down right now. It was made in 1988 so I guess it has been fairly reliable.

This is the part I've been waiting to get to....It SUCKS. If anyone knows where I can get a schematic for this unit PLEASE, PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE let me know. I've wasted hours looking for one on the internet. The company is evedently out of business. I'm praying that someone will know something, anything about this unit. If you have or know where to get a schematic e-mail me at wayne-tracy@e-mail.msn.com

I wouldn't recommend buying any ADA equipment at all. The reason being you can't get it repaired. I don't use it myself but a friend does and when the power amp fried I told him I'd try to fix it. But to my dismay there was no phone numbers, web sites, schematics or anything else available to aid in the repair of this unit. Again if anyone can aid me in any way please contact me at wayne-tracy@e-mail.msn.com