In Church Bass Digest #1312 Paul Follmer wrote:
> The goal I guess would be to improve the tone that comes through the mains.

What do you feel needs "improving" about it... keep in mind that you can only impact the sound to a certain degree no matter what you do. The basic design of the PA system will have a much larger impact than anything you can do at your end.

> I am leaning towards the DI because 1) I can actually try it out 2) supposedly, but I don't know why, I can't use the pre amp with an active bass, if I ever get one, and 3) more variety of tone enhancing options.

The sound shaping options on the Sans Amp Bass DI are primarily intended for recording purposes, though in some circumstances they may be useful for live DI. The sound shaping circuits are mostly there to get a variety of "sort of like" amp sounds. So you can get an "sort of like SVT sound", or a "sort of like Marshall" sound etc. These are somewhat subtle sound variations and its questionable whether anything but a very high quality PA system would be capable of articulating them clearly in the mix.

The Sadowsky outboard pre-amp is intended to give some "active" features to passive instruments. It provides a high impedance input which only has to be on a short cable length (a foot or so) from the bass, which eliminates any line loading effects on the sound. It also has a low output impedance, which means the signal out of it is not much effected by an line loading on the longer cable from the pre-amp to the next step in the signal chain, be it effects unit or amp head. Lastly, it provides bass and treble boost only controls. In my experience, using a Sadowsky outboard pre-amp with a passive bass generally gives some "warmth" to the basic sound of the instrument but doesn't basically alter its intrinsic sound (unless of course you start tweaking the treble/bass controls). There's nothing to stop you using a Sadowsky pre-amp with an active bass, but there's really no point as you would be largely duplicating facilities already built in to the bass.

BTW, the DI in the SWR Basic Black is after one stage of tube amplification if you use the "Hi Gain" or "Active/Passive" input. If you use the "Low Gain or " Active" input, you get no tube stages before the DI.

Cheers, Bill

Bill Bolton
Sydney, Australia