To overcome the limitation of traditional absorber systems with invariable damping and stiffness characteristics which can only achieve good absorbing performance under designed conditions, a new absorber based on two magneto-rheological (MR) dampers was proposed to realize the variable damping and stiffness characteristics. As the first step, the theory of variable damping and stiffness characteristics of the proposed absorber was analyzed, and the adjustable range of variable damping and stiffness was also analyzed. Then an adaptive controller based on the energy principle and skyhook control was developed. Finally, a numerical simulation was performed to validate the proposed absorber and the controller. The simulations show that the absorbing system based on the MR absorber could greatly reduce the peak impact load of sprung mass with smaller stroke of absorbing system. Moreover, it has better performance than passive absorbing system, which shows that the absorber based on MR variable stiffness and damping is feasible in practice.