BigRedX

IME unless your fingerboard is made out of something very soft, round-wound strings won't do any more damage to it then they do to the frets on a fretted bass. However, it does help if you use "classical" vibrato technique (back and forth rather than side to side). Besides if you do manage to significantly damage the fingerboard you can always get your luthier to re-shoot it smooth, in the same way that you would have a refret to replace worn frets on a fretted bass.

I don't know. The pre-amp on mine (Phoenix 5) was active only for the 3-band EQ. The volume control and pickup blend were both passive.

I bought mine almost entirely for the looks. Unfortunately the other aspects of the instrument were distinctly underwhelming - the finish on the neck was so thin I could feel the roughness of the wood, nasty sharp fret ends, flabby sounding and feeling low-B despite the 35" scale length, and the pan pot failed after a couple of months. It looked great and always attracted admiring comments from people when I took it as my spare fretted bass to gigs, but I was thankful that I never needed to use it.

Why? If you are after that Mick Karn/Pino Paladino fretless sound you have to have rounds. Flats won't do, no matter how much you alter your plucking technique and EQ.

Actually what you can't beat is a decent song that sounds good at low volume. Pretty much anything can be made to sound exciting when it is loud.

TI Jazz flats or Pedulla Nickels depending on what sort of sound and feel you are after.

Surely the massive bridge is the whole USP of a Traben bass? Replacing it just makes it another run-of-the-mill low-to-mid-price Korean instrument.

I had the opposite experience. I got into music in the early 70s and the Grateful Dead were definitely one of the bands that you were supposed to be into if you liked less mainstream music. Several of my school friends were big fans, and I loved the album cover designs (especially Blues For Allah), but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get on with the music. It was pleasant in it's own way, but there was little in the way of sing-alone tunes, heavy guitars, or the right kind of weirdness for me. Luckily punk (and post-punk) came along and gave me exactly what I had been looking for musically. Nothing I've heard by the Grateful Dead since then has caused me to really change my opinion.

I had Luminlays fitted to my Warwick StarBass as The Terrortone used to play some very murky "stages" and the conventional markers were impossible see once I'd put my shades (part of our stage wear) on. I would have done the fitting myself, but with the bass being a set neck getting the ones at the body end in looked tricky so I took the bass to a recommended luthier in Nottingham who charged me about £70 for the fitting a took about a week to do it. They made a excellent job of it and IMO it was well worth the money. Had it been a bolt-on neck I would have probably done it myself. As others have said you need to remember to charge the dots up before you go on stage, so just remember to keep the charging torch in the gig bag or case that the bass goes in and you'll be fine. If you are really paranoid buy a spare and keep it in your leads (or other gig items) bag.

They wouldn't be listening with their eyes rather than their ears? Heaven forbid!

Whoever else is on the bill when both In Isolation and Hurtsfall play at the Wharf Chambers as part of Leeds Goth City on Saturday 9th September.

There with PMC we have the first mention of quality studio audio manufacturer in a HiFi thread, although the BB5 is from their Home Audio range rather than the studio one.

I have to admit I've never listened to any of the really high-end HiFi units, because I've never had the opportunity. AFAIK none of the local HiFi retailers I've visited over the past 40 years stock this kind of equipment and if they did I know for a fact from auditioning more mainstream stuff that none of them had a suitable listening space that would do it justice. The things I would want from a high-end system, that would improve my listening experience would be the ability to remove excessive compression and brick-wall limiting from digital audio, or being able to compensate for vinyl that has been pressed off-centre as well as removing all the manufacturing defects and playing/handling wear that manifest as various pops and crackles and overall extraneous background noise. Those are the things that would make the music sound better for me, not the ability to hear non-musical details that should really have been picked up and corrected when the recording was actually being made. It is interesting also that there is very little cross-over between the high-end audio reproduction aimed at serious recording studios, and HiFi, and when there are manufactures that service both, they have different products aimed at each market. You would have thought that the aim of the serious HiFi listener would be to replicate the sorts of systems that the music they like was made on in the first place. Surely that would be the ultimate listening experience? If I had the kind of money that "serious" HiFi demands, for me it would be far better spend on making music, either in the form of musical equipment or time in the studio with a capable and well-known producer.

How a recording is made is important because it will to some extent dictate how obvious (or not) all these extraneous sounds are. I don't think that the more expensive and esoteric HiFi does simply reproduce the audio signal as accurately as possible. If it did there would be no place for vinyl since it places a load of compromises upon the recorded audio simply to work as a delivery medium. Also a HiFi would have no controls other than volume and there would only be a single make of each component available because once each device has been made to affect the signal as little as possible there would be no need for any others. However what HiFi really does is to colour the audio signal in a way that each manufacturer considers to be pleasing while denying the fact that there is any colouration going on.

Lots of EQs and lots of distortion/overdrives. Never a good combination unless you are only using one EQ and one distortion at a time. What amp is all this going into? It will have yet another EQ section and maybe depending on what it is yet more distortion.

And you won't know exactly what sound you need until you hear it with the rest of the band playing. I have a Line6 Helix, and when I am working on a new song I will have a pretty good idea of the sound I am after and get it programmed up with all the modules I need. However I won't be able to perfect that sound until I'm in the rehearsal room with the rest of the band, and can tell where need to tweak it to get it right for the overall band sound.

IMO rehearsing as a band is both about making sure you're all playing the right notes at the right time AND making sure that you all have the right sounds for the song(s).

The problem with any kind of serious HiFi is that most of the supposed advantages are entirely wiped out by the way that anything since 1990 was actually recorded. It would do most "HiFi buffs" a world of good to actually have a look at a typical recording studio and see just how many 100s of metres of very ordinary cable the average audio signal passes through. Add to that the fact that most processing occurs either in the digital domain inside the computer or an a external device that is probably full of tightly-packed surface-mounted components. They would be far better off spending money on some basic acoustic treatment for their listening space instead of the diminishing returns of ever-more expensive and esoteric playback devices (and goes for both analogue and digital systems).

But you did. It's a vibrato mechanism [/pedant]

AFAICS it's more down to the fact that Thomann don't appear to process any of the orders for dispatch until the end of the week. I have never had an email saying that my order was with the carrier service until the Friday. The delivery time after that is pretty standard for non-priority from the EU mainland.

TBH once your tape speed goes to 15ips and the track width 1/4" you don't really need NR. And 30ips speed brings its own new set of audio artefacts (IIRC the speed of the tape starts to interact with the bias frequency and not in a good way). In the end everything is compromise. Improve in one area and you can often make it worse in another.

Listening without actually watching the video the differences between the three were far less obvious and would have completely disappeared once the EQ and compression had been adjusted for them to fit into a band mix.

Except IIRC Ped borrowed the idea off the owner of "Bassworld" who probably borrowed the idea off TalkBass...

Yes all those other factors have an effect but the main one is the slew of the digital to analogue converter makes the curve virtually smooth again. Plus the fact that your crude illustration neatly avoids showing that, for CD quality audio, peak-to-peak there are 65,536 vertical steps and 41,100 horizontal steps for ever second making each of those absolutely tiny in the first place. Having spent years of my musical "career" struggling to overcome the limitations of analogue systems - the budget ones are terrible, and the good ones require constant maintenance to get the best performance out of them - for all the supposed benefits of analogue audio they can't beat the convenience of digital. IMO both systems have drawbacks when it come to audio fidelity, but for appropriately prepared (mastered) audio I'll take 16bit 44.1kHz or better digital, over any analogue system every time. If you were really serious about analogue audio you'd be looking at high-speed 1/2" 2-track tape with Dolby A NR on a properly calibrated playback system over any vinyl reproduction. For me, so long as the delivery system is not noticeably intruding on the audio signal, I'd rather just listen to the music rather than worry about the format it comes on.

Except that it has got very little to do with Quantisation and Timing Jitter and a lot more to do with the fact that no electronic device can jump between two different voltage states instantaneously, so all those hard steps get turned back into smooth curves due to the nature of physics. There. I managed to say it in two lines with no need for an over-large and inaccurate diagram.