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Oooooh, yes it does!

Oh no it doesn't! 😁

A Honer B2 is the equivalent of a Steinberger Spirit these days, which retail at about $400. We live in glory days of inexpensive basses.

Great looking bass and as mentioned perhaps one or two high frets I would get a luthier to work on it if you want a flatter neck and don’t attempt it yourself unless you’ve done it before

We've just come back from seeing Jack & the Beanstalk at The Hippodrome in Bristol. We had cracking seats and I sat just in front of where the bass player was in the pit (under the stage). How does it all work? Can the musicians in the pit see the stage performance on a monitor? I couldn't see any? I guess it's all IEM and that the musical director (the chap at the keyboard in front of the stage) speaks to the band through his mic? He also used what looked like a proper old fashioned phone handset. How on earth do they get their cues? Panto format deviates from script a lot, so I guess that you have to really pay attention. It's worlds apart from anything I've ever done and I'm fascinated to understand how it works. And in case he's on here, the chap on the SR5 did a cracking job and, guessing again, that he plays an SR5 because it just does what it does in that environment with 100% reliability. It would be great if some Basschatters that have done or do this could give some insight as it's so different from what most of us are familiar with.

They would still consider it expensive.

I'd certainly not want to be spending a months wages on a bass now!

To me, expensive means paying more than you need to. So I'm firmly at £1,000 as that's where the law of diminishing returnd really kicks in. These days you can buy a bass perfectly capable of the standard required for any stage in the world for comfortably under £1k. I paid over that for a couple of basses and a couple that would have been more new. The extra pays for things that aren't actually necessary that take them into the realm of being luxury items where you choose to pay more. 25 years ago or more, you had to pay proportionally a lot more to get something of the quality you can get for £500-£750 these days.

Could just be a tall fret.

One More Night - Phil Collins

I'm going out on a limb here and guessing these are not professional level lighting fixtures.

I prefer traditional VVT, that way I can of course get all things Jazz but also get very near Precision if needed by neck full, bridge 20%-ish, tone 80%-ish.

Maybe, but if the SpeakOn jacks are PCB mounted it's going to be more difficult and with a greater chance for a more thoroughly damaged speaker.

It’s all relative to income too isn’t it? I’ve worked on min wage when a Mexican fender was beyond my means, and I’ve had very well paid friends who could drop £5k on a bass if they wanted - but in careers that probably wouldn’t give them the time to play much. Ive known people who have a seperate bass fund and spend out of gig earnings, vs hobby funds vs people on here who buy expensive things they can’t afford on credit … all going to affect what you see as affordable.

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.