ltgobis

5 hours ago, CookPassBabtridge said:

Sorry to hear you’ve had this hassle @ltgobis Sadly, it looks as if the hum in the vid posted earlier wasn’t an isolated problem/a grounding issue then. This could be a ‘teething issue’ with the first batch and be fixed soon but even so it raises concerns regarding QC. 

I have already contacted Sadowsky about the fix so at least they have another data point on the problem. Hopefully it points them in the right direction. My guess is that they already have this under control for new builds.

I just received my new Metro Express 5 string jazz bass. I have the same horrible noise problems as everyone noticed. Being an electronics geek I had to look in to the problem and stared poking around inside the electronics compartment. I noticed that if I touched the blue or green wire going from the treble control to the input of the preamp the noise would increase. It looked like the problem was at the input of the preamp. I went to my electronics parts bin and found a .01uf bypass capacitor. The type used in most circuits to suppress (bypass) RF signals to ground. I placed it between the blue wire (lug) and ground (lug) on the bass control. Amazingly this fixed the problem and now I have a very quite Metro Express. One thing that is notable. Sadowsky already has a bypass capacitor between the blue wire and ground. So adding my capacitor placed it in parallel to the stock one. The fact that adding my capacitor fixed the problem tells me that either the stock capacitor was defective or it was not large enough to suppress the noise. Also, adding only .01uf on the treble control will not roll off audio frequencies.