Listening tests of high end capacitors...

[Steve Conner]

I don't think they've had a bassist worth hearing since Cliff Burton died.

I've heard live recordings of Metallica where James Hetfield is running such a bass-heavy sound that you can hear his speakers farting out completely. Years ago I was trying to copy that tone, and couldn't, until I got a pair of nasty old speakers and overdrove them so hard with boosted bass that the cones rattled against the speaker grills.

[big_teee]

Unless it's Metallica, in which case you never hear the bass. (unless it's old Metallica)

I think all bass players should sound like Jack Bruce.
Loud & Proud. He sounds great playing his Warwick Bass!
Terry

[David Schwab]

I don't think they've had a bassist worth hearing since Cliff Burton died.

I've heard live recordings of Metallica where James Hetfield is running such a bass-heavy sound that you can hear his speakers farting out completely. Years ago I was trying to copy that tone, and couldn't, until I got a pair of nasty old speakers and overdrove them so hard with boosted bass that the cones rattled against the speaker grills.

Well they have had good players, including he current one, but Hetfield hasn't let anyone hear them. He yells at them when he can hear them.

When he records, he uses a sealed box with a speaker and a mic in it. So it's like a single speaker cab in a box.

[David Schwab]

I think all bass players should sound like Jack Bruce.
Loud & Proud. He sounds great playing his Warwick Bass!
Terry

Jack Bruce was my first big influence! I mean I liked Motown and the Beatles, and those were one reason I wanted to play bass (even though I started on drums, and then guitar). But Bruce, especially on the live recordings was it. My first big bass amp was a Peavey, because it had an overdrive control that got he perfect Jack Bruce tone.

Felix Pappalardi was another great player with a similar tone, and then later Tim Bogert with BBA.

[Joe Gwinn]

It doesn't require a piezo to quack

We've measured 100 volt peaks from even piezo polymer pickups with a simple ball bearing drop from about 12". Not a big bearing, either... Under load and in a bridge it isn't that bad, and that peak is only on a half cycle, but it's there. It's one of the reasons why piezos "quack"...that quack is very quick clipping with the buffer trying valiantly to recover. We've found that going to 18 volt on-board electronics really helps; our D-TAR acoustic guitar pickups have become known for high headroom and low quack factor.

With a regular singlecoil driving a JFET buffer, one can also get a quack. A sufficiently strong attack impulse will cause gate-to-drain punchthrough, and what had been a nicely clipped peak becomes a pair of far sharper adjacent peaks, the center of the original pulse having been inverted.

A resistor in series with the JFET gate tames this effect, as well as controlling the effect of gate-source zener action, and a higher drain voltage raises the threshold for the effect to even begin.

While CMOS transistors won't show such punchthrough (if one stays within the max gate voltage spec), they are pretty noisy compared to JFETS.