Passinwind

All of my preamps have signal/noise ratio and distortion specs comparable to most good commercial bass amps. Headroom is sometimes not as good, mostly due to 9V powering, but still more than good enough IMHO. Job one is a vanishingly low noise floor and anything that fails that is not going into my builds in the long term. Each bass has a different onboard preamp format and my main two players came from a luthier who explicitly wants me to experiment a lot. So right now I have my DIY'er oriented open source "filter" one in my fretted 5 string bass, and my modular 2 + 1 band boards in my new fretless. The fretless features outboard power and can easily be configured to a Ric-O-Sound sort of format since I used a 4 pin XLR output. Most of my amps have variable high pass filters and a single band full parametric EQ. I see those as mostly tools for room correction, but the HPF interacts greatly with my onboard bass control and allows bass peaking at a wide variety of frequencies, which can have other useful applications than just avoiding room nodes, aka unwanted boom or dead zones. Bass, mid, and treble controls are all crafted to interact in musically beneficial ways. Neither the onboard set or the ones in the amp are "better", and the idea is that the sum of the parts is greater than the individual bits might suggest. At this point I'm just s retired tech/hobbiest, but I have done a couple of commercial designs for my luthier friend. Right now they only are available in his basses, but he expects that to change sooner than later. I have nothing to do with the marketing, and am wrapping up pre-production building after having done several runs of around ten boards at a time. The most popular format at NAMM over the last couple of years has proven to be active bass and mids coupled with a standard passive treble control - this is my friend's standard offering for his Jazz Bass oriented active bass builds these days. When you switch into passive mode the tone control is just like a stock Fender format, more or less. We're currently working on at least three different active treble control modules, some of which may keep the passive one in play as well. Most of the amp builds are detailed over on Talkbass, and there is also a brief overview here: http://passinwind.com/DIY.html

All three of my basses are always active, with no bypass switch even installed. As usual, I roll my own preamps. What they do better for me is interact well with my amps (which I also built, naturally). I design the whole ball of wax as an integrated system, as much as possible.

Personally, I think we all lose in a very real sense when music becomes a ".vs" thing. But I'm still enjoying many of the responses to this thread, as I so often do on Basschat.

I used T-I JFs on my fretless for a dozen years. When I replaced them with Ernie Ball Cobalt Flats in the lightest gauge I did need to do a pretty small neck relief tweak due to higher tension, but the overall play feel is fairly similar and the Cobalt Flats sound much much better to me on that particular bass.

A custom set of neo sidewinder humbuckers. There's a huge range of humbucker formats outside of MusicMan and the P-Bass.

Well, you missed every single one of my favorite US bands, so... Just for starters: Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Santana, Allman Bros. Band, Frank Zappa, Talking Heads, Ornette Coleman, Pat Metheny Band, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Buddy Rich, The Supremes, Johnny Cash, and the MC5.

I'm a very happy user of the Pure Blues strings. I briefly tried Sunbeams on the same bass but the gauges were too small for the way the nut is cut. Preferred the feel and sound of the PB in the next size up, but this was certainly not a fair fight. In any case, the PB last a good year or so on my fretted fiver, with very little tonal changes after the first week or three.

I like this tune much better than anything I've heard from those three bands. Vive la difference! But OTOH, I very rarely watch the video portion of YouTube music clips. Good music takes my mental imagery to much different places than cheesy vids, at least hopefully.

I do that too sometimes and love how it sounds and feels. I also build my own amps and all of them are optimized for my active basses, which have my own preamps in them. For me it's all about having a tightly integrated system.

Excellent!

My old living room bass rig, missing another rack or two: DIY bass head and DIY preamp/power amp: Another old bass rig, big blue thing is a homemade tube preamp:

Yep. None of my basses even have a bypass to passive switch installed. And the closer the preamp is to an URB the better, in my book.

I think it's mostly your imagination, although I'm definitely not a big fan. One luthier friend of mine charges less for his relic models, since they take considerably less time to finish. The first time I took one back to my shop for some electronics work he handed it to me without a case or bag: "What are you gonna do, scratch it?"

Tec Amp used to, but found other Class D solutions to work better for them.

My friend Marco also uses dyed and stabilized wood quite a bit. One of my Marco Basses has a spalted maple fingerboard that looks a lot like ebony, for instance. That might just drive CITES inspectors mad, is that a plus or a minus?

Ad-speak mostly, as someone else already inferred. Throw in "pyrolyzed" or "pyrolized" as well.

Marco takes a lot of flak for how he does those promo pics. He has little foam pads that he cut out specifically for that purpose, the basses are not scratched up from it at all. But yeah, it still makes me wince too, even though I've seen how the sausage is made!

My friend Marco Cortes (Marco Bass Guitars) has been messing around with torrefied wood for a few years in his bass builds. Here's a roasted ash neck on one of his Fender-ish models: I had that bass here for a few weeks for a preamp install, it sounds and feels quite fab.

Yep. Here are my only non-keepers, over 45+ years of playing: 60s EB-O 70s Guild Starfire Early 70s Fender Jazz None of those hung around for even two years. The Guild and the Fender both had substantial neck issues, and I didn't like either one nearly enough to pony up for the needed repairs, or even to try buying another example of those brands. And then my '77 Travis Bean fretless, which I always loved the sound of, but eventually the weight just got to be too much for this old geezer. Sold it after 40 years of great enjoyment, with no real regrets.

Yep, but some of us would just like a single unit to sit at a practice space somewhere, be super easy to lend out, etc. Personally, I'd rather have the head section live in a cab rather than a fabric bag of some sort. But for me that only applies to practice gear, which is what the Elf would potentially be for me, especially if only coupled with a single 8 or 10.

Reminds me of Flora Purim quite a bit.

Nope, and I don't assign gender to them either.

Close...I would be quite happy to get rid of two others now. Two or three bass guitars is the absolute max I could ever see wanting for myself. I didn't ask for the new one, although if it had already been made like that and I saw it I just might have been GAS afflicted. And now that I have it, it's clearly already my #1. My friend knows me very well and he also played my former #1 a few times before he started this project.

Yep, different strokes. I've shown a few amps at NAMM that are similar in size to the B|Amp and user feedback was extremely positive. Not all of us want to put our amp in a gig bag with an instrument. Several years ago the Forte HP or your Puma would have been quite attractive to me, but now even a 300 watt amp is pretty serious overkill for my playing situations. In any case, the B|Amp I heard at NAMM a year or two ago was truly outstanding, and I can't think of many company owners who know their market better than Jim Bergantino. The fact that he does so much of the engineering himself is just icing on the cake.

He's talking the Forte HP, not the older Forte. If you don't count 400+ extra watts and actually want deep menu driven programming, perhaps so. It's not exactly a big heavy thing for being a 1200 watt unit though, really. Personally, I greatly prefer that form factor, the controls are just too cluttered and close together for my taste on many of the "micro" ones.