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In that case I might go with the ambients - I don't think we'll be silent stage any time soon. Thank you.

Thanks. We're home now and she's sleeping at last.

From the fact that the cabs are secondhand and one socket is worse than the other, I’m very inclined to suspect that it’s those sockets that are bad. Maybe they’ve been repeatedly used with a non-genuine Speakon plug that has damaged them. The obvious thing to test would be whether you see any problem with a different cab. The good news is that it looks like it should be easy to remove the connector panels and replace the faulty connectors on the cabs. If you don’t fancy doing it yourself it shouldn’t be too expensive to have a tech do it.

There is no additional risk of a feedback as the ambient mic won’t be going into foh. There’s no way the ambient mic will be picking up any output from the IEMs. To be fair, setting up an ambient mic is pretty low effort.

To be clear - if the seal is broken, ambient or otherwise, there is a tradeoff in that you start to lose bass response. How much of that which is tolerable - but as a bass player, you probably won’t appreciate it. Best practice is to think along the lines, anything you want to hear, you pump in via the mix. There is a line of thinking that if you have a bass rig on stage, having that come in ambiently offsets the bass loss… but the goal is to keep stage volumes low so the mix the audience hears out front is better.

At the risk of adding to the "overthinking this" aspect. 😉 "Expensive" is intangible, and so hard to measure. I therefore recommend the following excellent book: https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/how-to-measure-anything-book-douglas-w-hubbard-9780470539392?

Very true but with so much power it’s easy to set it so it sounds clean. Would have been nice to have so maybe the mk2 will have one ?

The NS2000/4 is very different from what you might expect and is worth commenting on. It's got really big solid maple wings with a quilted maple veneer that is around 8mm at its thickest point around the pickups. The upper horn is feckin' hoooge. It's long too and ends above fret 12/13. This makes it much more "Fender" on the strap. The neck carve is a bit skinny in my world, it's 41mm at the nut and 26mm deep at the first fret. Now that's a Louisville Slugger to your modern J and Ibby SR players but for me, it's about as skinny as I'll go. The cavity cover has 6 screws that go into brass grommets and that cover is recessed. This is a feature that should have been on Euros. I've added grommets and machine screws to all mine but I can't ever see myself routing any of my Euros. The tuners are budget. I'll be buying some used Gotoh tuners to replace them. The nut and bridge are brass but are unique and specific to this bass from what I've seen. They're a bit soft but are now than for for purpose and at 25 years old are in much better condition than the frets, which I thought were a bit soft compared to other nickel frets I've worked on. The quality of the woodworking is fantastic as you'd expect from that Korean factory. It's a proper 3-piece maple neck through build with mahoosive maple wings, a reasonably nice quilt vender and very high quality build. The savings in materials come from the hardware, the electronics and savings in cheap dot markers versus pearl inlays. What surprised me was the extra CNC run to put the route around the cavity instead of leaving it out and putting the cover on top of the back surface like on a Euro. The paint job and finish is top notch but the colour is ever so dull. It's like a foggy day up North. No one is ever going to say, "Phwoar! That's a looker." I'm going to give it the @Mike Brooks treatment tomorrow. Water with Simple Green at a 30:1 ratio to clean and some Dunlop 65 Carnuba to polish it up. Fantastic and thanks to Mike for the tip. I did the fretboard with Crimson Fretboard Cleaner and Crimson Fretboard Restorative yesterday and that did wonders. I usually use Monty’s products but found some Crimson dregs (great name for a band) in the garage last week. I'll post a pic tomorrow when it's finished its glow up. NS2A for the next project. Although a Korean-built Legend NT rescue would be worth the effort and interesting to see how different that is.

True but if you want a new Rickenbacker or Musicman you are going to need a little more than 2K.

Great amp apart from having no input gain clip indicator.

Indeed. Personally I would rather own one bass I love than 5 or 6 mediocre ones anyway. It does seem like one expensive bass attracts more ire than several mid priced ones..

Really liked his playing and singing. I discovered him in the late 80's with my first job as the car I was using back then had a cassette player with a Chris Rea album definitely locked in... And as I was driving this car 4 hours a day, I ended up really appreciating his music. Weird way to discover someone's talent, I know. May he rest in peace.

Yep. You can't take it with you. I would add that expensive doesn't always equal better, depending on what you want/need. In terms of function, the law of diminishing returns kicks in once you get towards £2k and upwards. However, pride of ownership is important. A nicer instrument will make you happier than a giant telly.

Just because you could do something doesn’t mean you should!

Ha ha, not yet no. But it did get very nice Gotoh GB707s and a D-tuner.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of wish-fulfilment if you can afford it. I really don't go for the idea that anyone has to justify their purchases in terms of how and where they are going to use them. If it's your own money to spend, do as you please and enjoy it how you like.

I shall crack an egg in my bath in his honour tonight..... Seriously though, will be sorely missed. I always loved when "Driving Home For Christmas" came on when I would drive home to the North East as a young lad. Holy ground indeed. RIP Chris.

Here's the fret job in progress. On an instrument with very worn frets there's a point that comes when doing a fret level where you need to make the call on either carrying on or a re-fret. This Far Eastern beaut will be getting new frets in the summer, I'm looking forward to putting Jescar 55090 stainless narrow/tall frets on, doing the fall from 15 onward and seeing how that goes. (Fret fall is brilliant if you pay up dusty ends a lot). If it works out nicely I'll be refretting the '02 E4 and the '17 E4LX Maple as they're pretty battered.