BBE 383 Bass Preamp

If not familiar with eq ranges in terms of numbers, it can be confusing. It took me about five minutes or so to figure out what was what. but as soon as I did, i was able to fiddle with it and produce a sound 10x better than just my GK alone

ibanez soundgear 300dx thru the 383, into a GK 400 RB that goes into a GK Backline 4x10 and a fender bassman 1x15. SOUNDS RIPPIN'. it is noisey and does feedback, but thats just because I have it all overdriven for the sound that i want. thats why its a 9 and not a 10. With the setup I have, the only sound I can't get is the disgustingly distorted bass, like the hives, but who cares. Anything else, it can nail.

I haven't had it for that long yet, we'll see. seems solid enough though. survived a trip from dallas to buffalo no problem.

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I play hardcore/metal/punk type music. think everytime I die, Unearth, and Refused fused into one. best way I can think of describing it. www.canaryinacoalmine.net we host our mp3s on the site, if u wanna listen to the songs. I'm not too keen on the tone on that recording, but it was a quick demo, so what can you do? better than a mxr m80 pedal and a sansamp pedal. I basically got it so all my stuff was rackmounted, and turned out to have a great product. if ur in the market for a preamp, bbe is excellent, the only other I can recommend would be the sansamp rackmount (don't pay for than $240 for that brand new though)

ease of use would be greatly enhanced if the punch, "bbe process" and compressor were controlled by a footswitch instead of tiny buttons. the lowest x-over point is 200hz, a little too high for some 18"/10" combinations, and is not very narrow-i.e. it has too much audible overlap. the compressor has 1 knob.

i run an old american made kramer frontier rwfretboard/alder body precision with semour duncan active "vintage" voiced exposed polepiece bassline pick-ups thru it. i usually use a cs 800 in stereo(biamp) sometimes i bridge the cs800 into a jbl 2242 18" and run the hi's to an 80watt 2'8"+tweeter acoustic guitar amp thru it's effect send. this is quite loud. the bbe is pretty quiet, noise wise. i can get a few good, distinct sounds, but not "on the fly", best adjusted beween songs.

the thick aluminum front plate was bet when i bought it(used)that took some force too do that. i've had it 2 years, one of the out of the rack and it functions flawlessly. this one is hard to kill.

rock,metal,blues,old r&b&country. this unit is good for clean bass sounds. i dont like distorted bass tones for the most part, and would look at tube distortion if i needed an overdriven sound. maybe you could "goose" the front end of an old fender tube bass head with the hi output of the crossover. use different speakers if you want to tailor your sound more. dont forget a tweeter (or antenuating the tweeter) makes a of difference. one hell of a lot more useful than bbe's noisy sonic maximizer. if it were lost/stolen and i could get one for less than $120, i'd buy it. rack gear is the way to fly. you take as much amp as you need. old peavey cs800 are cheap, reliable and lay down deep bass at high volumes. get a smaller lighter amp for top cab/practice.

pretty easy and straightforward, as follows: input gain control knob, punch in/out switch, 6 band eq rotary knobs (60, 125, 250, 600, 1200, and 3300 hz), rotary compression knob and in/out switch, BBE section with two knobs: Lo-contour and Process, crossover frequency select knob, crossover balance between hi/low knob, and volume (output gain) knob. It's easy to get the hang of but sorta tricky to dial in your sound, since there's kinda a lot of different stuff with the bbe section and crossover etc.

pretty damn good. The gain knob goes up pretty high before the nasty s/s distortion starts coming in. The punch knob is a life saver, sorta like the "loud" control on home and car stereos... boosts the low and high end somewhat. the eq bands are in the right frequencies but the higher ones seem kinda ineffective, and the lower ones are kinda wide, turning them up makes the frequencies get kinda muddy. the compression is simply one knob, the more you turn it the more compression you get. Plenty for any style. The BBE section is great, as usual. Just be careful, too much lo-contour and your speakers will be working really hard. The crossover is a nice feature if you're running into two amps for a biamp situation. It's also nice if you have too much untamed hi-end or low end coming out, instead of using the full range output use the hi or low out and use it to sut those frequencies. Volume control works well, will drive any power amp to it's max input level. The full range output goes out to a 1/4 inch or XLR out, which is nice because you can run the 1/4" to your amp and use the XLR for the sound guy's DI instead of running into his DI box before your preamp. That way your preamp settings make it to the mixing board, not just your generic bass signal. Also has an effects loop, although i never tried it.

yeah i've been using it for a while w/o any problems. However, i had two other bbe processors that took shits on me after about a year or two.

yes, the one bbe unit i had that took a shit was under warranty. I emailed them, they emailed back with a return auth # and i sent it off. Came back fixed in two weeks, no problems since.

a pretty damn good preamp for bass. works better than guitar preamp or just an eq pedal or prolly even better than one of those ART multi-fx processors. Cheaper too. The only problems are that the eq bands seems kinda weird, muddy, and not much highs. Need an extra band above the 3300 hz one, maybe at 8k for some more highs.