All Activity

I am temporarily popping out of my posting retirement to say, the solution to an untraced fault causing electric shocks via the mic is NEVER to remove more earth connections. This is a potentially (geddit) lethal scenario. If you have any doubts at all about a venue's electrics or your gear, at least plug in through a decent RCD. For god's sake don't try and work around it by removing earths! By the way, a local RCD on your gear is safer than relying on an RCBO back at the distribution board, because RCD effectiveness is influenced by length of a cable run.

Headstock looks a bit different - the Vox is like the bastard offspring of a Buzzard and a Sire, the one in the original photo looks like a Fender headstock in a corset. Controls on the scratchplate look the same though.

You've had the last ones!

Might be worth mentioning that I had a similar issue with a PJB Briefcase, sent it back, got a replacement, issue solved (and Phil himself was really helpful). Perhaps worth a try?

Pretty much made my mind up to return my Anagram. The UI is great but, to be honest, I don't spend a lot of time creating and tweaking patches. Once I create a patch that's it done. So the benefit of the great UI is minimal for my use case. I don't use any amps or cabs in my patches and they are one of the big selling points of the Anagram. If you use amps and cabs it's definitely worth a look. There are only a small amount of FX pedals most of which are distortion variants and I don't use distortion. That leaves a few pedals of interest to me such as chorus, octaver, compressor, etc. The octavers are excellent but the chorus is underwhelming as are the compressors. The two things that convinced me to return it are the poor compressor implementation, I can't believe they gave it that beautiful screen but didn't bother to find space for compressor metering and the terrible supplied PSU which causes mains hum forcing the use of a secondary PSU or a USB supply which means you can't have it attached to your computer while powering it. I have contacted Darkglass support through two different means regarding the mains hum but have still to hear back from them. There simply are not enough fx options of good quality for me and I have low confidence that a company of the size of Darkglass will have the software development resources to improve this any time soon. Please don't take the above as a total negative view as I am clearly not the intended user for the Anagram. If you use amp, cab and distortions this pedal will have a lot to offer you.

Pretty much every amplified instrument benefits from some degree of signal processing. Your choice of amp and cab(s) is the same as any other effect. Otherwise there would be no point in having some many different brands of amplification. Stick your bass through a rig that did absolutely nothing but increase the amplitude of the input signal and everyone would complain that it made their bass sound bland and lifeless.

I wonder if anyone can help me identify the bass below. It is a 2005 active Sandberg fretless bass. However I am trying to confirm what model it is. I have asked the question of Sandberg but got a reply from their support mail box saying on leave until the 16th September. I think it may be an older "basic" model natural matt. Does anyone have an idea if I am correct or where I could confirm the model. Many thanks.

When A Man Loves A Woman - Percy Sledge

Thanks again for all the responses - it's invaluable hearing everyone's real-world experiences to balance up against the usual marketing nonsense and slappy online demos! Most helpful to me so far has been people's different takes on "hifi" and "transparent" which has certainly made me re-frame what these things actually mean to me. @Phil Starr - good to hear from you (and thanks again for the Monza recommendation!): Your take on "hifi" is I think pretty close to my own - not swamped by bass with a light and airy top end, so in that sense it could be that I'm not actually looking for "flat". In this sense the Monza is ideal as it is just that - flat, so whatever I sculpt on the preamp/pedals/amp is what it will produce. I would therefore like to risk knocking the discussion off track by redefining what I think I need from the amp physically and sonically, bearing in mind all of the excellent comments so far: Physically: -Needs to be small enough to go in my gig bag and sit on my desktop for DI'ing into Cubase or Zoom for recording/teaching -Really want to avoid fans if I can (but do appreciated the thoughts expressed so far) -Must have pre/post DI and FX Loop -Loudness is not critical. It does not need to have huge wattage - my Monza's efficiency has shown how much can be produced with comparatively little input. I don't need to compete with loud drummers or guitarists. Sonically: -Must have a low noise floor from the preamp and poweramp- this is primarily what I mean by "silent" (rather than fan noise etc). To provide context here: I used the Spectrum Curve tool in Cubase on the DI from the PJB D400, impedance on passive, gain up 100% (so worst case for noise), but with the connected bass turned right down and compared it to the same situation but measuring the DI from my Headway external preamp. The Headway was near as dammit silent - almost nothing on the spectrum curve above -100db apart from a slight 50hz bump from the mains. The D400 on the other hand had noise ripples going all the way up the frequency spectrum at around -76db. So anything I did on top of that for EQ, reverb, compression was just going to make that a lot worse. -Rather than specifying "flat" or "hifi", I think "refined" now best defines what I look for in tone. I don't rock, I don't slap. What I need is a solid warm low bass, well projected upper mids/lower highs with a smooth, airy top end. Most of this I can sculpt with my Source Audio EQ2 but I have to start with a good fundamental tone. Basically I really want to only use the amp's EQ for compensating for room / stage issues. The older PJB kit was a close match but much less so with their newer preamps. The D400 was (I think) the last of that "old" sound, which is why the noise issues were so frustraing. Forgot also to say that health-wise, charging up to Warwick or Camden Town is no longer a practical proposition for me, so I'm fairly restricted to what I can purchase on approval or take a risk on used. I entirely understand if the collective group throws up their hands in despair at my pickyness - but just wanted to express again how valuable your thoughts have been in getting my own thinking right!

Loving the Ibanezes (Ibani, Ibaneziz.. ) and the twelve stringer.

Yeah, it can sound better without anything, but I think it all depends on what music you play. It's like 'my ice cream actually tastes better without tabasco sauce on it'. Stuff like classic Blues, Motown, Rock n Roll, Reggae etc. often sound better without any 'hot sauce'! But some songs really need effects, threads like this 'Chorus, what songs need it?' https://www.basschat.co.uk/topic/514762-chorus-what-songs-need-it/ Or, you'd have trouble re-crating the Bassline from Thundercat's 'Them Changes' without an envelope filter, or Electric Wizard's 'Funeralopolis' without some heavy distortion/fuzz. I wouldn't give up on the hot sauce, it just needs to be used where appropriate.

That is a fair point! I was stretching the idea a little.

Spot on 👍

I agree with you both @agedhorse and @Phil Starr concerning the cooling as a whole that must be calculated to dissipate the heat efficiently and avoid the cooking of the transistors and many other electronic parts. But, when the noise comes from the fan itself, which is 99% of the time the case, replacing it with a silent model with the same airflow power is the safest way to solve the issue. And it's an easy job to compare the specs of the noisy fan with those of the silent one. Cheap fans are poorly made, very noisy, cheap for some reasons and too often used massively by the biggest names to simply cut the budget as excellent silent fans are more expensive. Take the time to have a look at the construction of those silent fans, and you'll understand why they are silent. Quality has a price, sorry.