Woodinblack

No, well if you only have a short lead you are only using the lead from the bass to the floor in your tone circuit and probably not getting too much noise, especialy if you have a good cable. Having a preamp means you don't have to worry about the cable (well, obviously, doens't help if the lead is actually faulty!). It is uncontroversial that some gain circuits work with more voltage, if you are below a certain point. If you are 9v with a decent preamp that would give you +/- 4v swing and without maxing out a bass control, your bass never gets even close to that, so having a +/- 8.5v swing on an 18v preamp isn't going to help. For reference, the original preamp in my Ibanez SR5005 prestige was 2 AA batteries, and you couldn't tell the difference between active and passive with the controls flat. Now replaced, but not for that reason (the mid sweep and treble were non functional) But yeh, it is just one of my bugbears. Many people like the sound of the RC network created by a guitar lead and the input you have plugged your bass into fine, and yes, it will generally be a bit softer, and that is fine. A decent preamp (used as a buffer) will give you the actual tone of your pickups, and without the filtering they can be too harsh. That is why many wireless systems give you a 'lead simulator' as they will give the same output as an active bass as they don't have the loading.

If so, why would it have a preamp? Tone shaping, yes, agreed, I don't tend to use mine, preamp? never. I don't want to hear what the tone circuit created by my lead is, I want to hear what the pickups are doing. If I don't want that much treble I will take it down in the amplifier, not just accept whatever my lead wants to do. And genuinely, if you can tell the difference between an 18v and a 9v preamp, one of your preamps is broken.

Don't see it mentioned on here, although I am sure I wrote about it, I notice in previous posts on here I mentioned that my smoothhound jack plug was loose. Well, it fell apart leaving a gig when I was tearing down. The side of the plug came out. Talked to chris at smoothound and for £20 he replaced all the metalwork and sent it back to me. it is perfect now.

I think I mention mine somewhere around here, it was a Vitos 8 or something? has 6 9v, and a 12/18v switchable. It is pretty good, but what I woudl really like is a mains powered one, rather than a 'wall wart' power supply, I have already lost one of those by the singer jumping on it. I have a separate box where I took the power supply apart and embedded it under the case so now it is fed by an IEC cable, but now I also have to plug the helix in too, as after a couple of hours if I power it from any power supply i have, it dies. Is it too much ask to have a mains powered isolated 4-6 9v 300ma, 9v 1a, 1 12v 1a, one 12v 2a power supply for less than £100? Seems it is!

That isn't an isolated supply though, it doesn't even claim it is an isolated supply. That is just a multiway power supply, like many others. As I said in my 3 year old post you quoted, I got an isolated supply and it sorted the noise out.

Jon has just come out with a new single actually (in the last week or so). Also he has an ibanez signature guitar coming out.

Not sure, the broken one is later. Looking through the photos I took on the first day (in fact the first one on this thread) I realise the crack was always there but for some reason I hadn't noticed it. Whether it became bigger or not later, it wasn't something that started when I had it. Seems odd that the second neck would actually be different wood / construction, its the same model and everything.

Always a shame, it is easier to keep customers than get new ones. I have personally never had particularly good dealings with them, and they aren't a place I would use for anything that I couldn't get anywhere else.

They come with an adaptor in the box.

And now I look the replacement (older) neck I have has a different construction to the original (newer) neck, the original one had light woods on the side and narrow spacing on the laminations, this has wenge on the side and wider laminations.

Nope, they are genuinely isolated. Back (probably when I wrote that), I had the zoom B3 and the Smoothhound. They could not co-exist on a non isolated board. I still have the smoothound, but the zoom is gone, and have a helix. Can't get that powered off anything other than its own supply so now a bit irrelevant.

Yes, its not the most obvious thing, but here, pick the pink bit or the yellow bit!

There are certainly options for which side you want when I look, who are you getting them from?

And today, I have had it back fixed, with a new neck (an older neck, the serial number is on the neck on all modern ibanez). Or maybe I have a new bass with an old body. Anyway, as I mentioned the B string wasn't as good as the 2605, I can say the B string on this new neck is really bright and punchy and nothing like the other one. Initial unplugged impression is that it is better than the SRs. So I suspect that as that crack was on the B string anchor, that the problem that caused the crack was there before the crack appeared.

Oh, I wish I hadn't looked that up.

Wow. That has to be a winner of this competition!

Clearly she is saying she likes the dead baby song, and admits she is lying if she says that she doesn't like eric clapton because of that. Either way it seems quite surprising that she had heard of Eric Clapton.

No, my ear gets most of the cymbal noise! Luckily I don't have unadorned ears.

Everyone is allowed to just like music, or whatever they want. Doesn't change anything about the music or whether other people have to. Noone is saying it is wrong to like Eric Clapton. Or even iron your jeans

Steve Cram stopped running, so cant be judged by what he is doing now as he stopped doing it. Arguably Bill Gates best work is what he is doing now, so I would say he is getting better as his earlier work which is frankly quite poor. EC carried on making music well past the time we were talking about so he can be judged by what he was doing both up to the 70s and way into the 00s. I am not sure that any of this is not self evident though

Threads are like children, you start them off all well intentioned, then they get their own ideas and throw parties when you are out and get god-knows-what in the carpet and eventually move out to shack up with someone you don't approve of.

To be fair, there is very little to discuss on his music. Like him or loath him you would have to be very positive on his achievements to think that he had done anything actually interesting since the 70s. I always wondered, when people say things like 'if hendrix hadn't died just think what amazing things he would be doing now' and the answer is, you really don't know do you? I would think that he would have continued to innovate, but maybe he would have just stayed stuck doing the same thing. Or he could have gone all synth pop in the 80s and ended up playing vegas. Maybe some memories are better the way they are!

I don't think so - for his songs, the 'voice' of the song is the guitar work. You can have the best drum and bass backing on a blues song but if the guitar isn't reaching you, the song isn't going to either.

As I said earlier, there is a difference between not saying something because you no longer believe it, or because you understand it is not something you can say without implications. It is hard for a casual observer to know which is which.

I got one from ebay some time ago to show we were too loud. It showed we were too loud! And it also showed us how difficult quiet is, and why we don't play places with a sound limiter. The apple watch has a dB meter in it. When I have finished a gig, my watch helpfully has a list of how many times the music was at a dangerous volume, and at the end of the week, which days were bad!