Epiphone Zenith preamp switches
 

Do any Zenith owners out there know exactly what the two switches on the [Shadow] preamp do? I just got a Zenith, and I'm playing with the setup and electronics. As far as I can tell, the switches affect only the magnetic pickup. The lower switch seems to be a gain control, and flipping it toward the tail gave me a much better balance between the two pickups (out of the box, the bridge was WAY louder than the magnetic pup).

The upper switch seems to make a slight difference in tone for the magnetic pup, but I haven't zeroed in on exactly what it is doing. Has anyone figured this out? This is a pretty weird bass! The neck is very nice, though...

I just got my Zenith the other day. Would love to know what the switches do. Not much gain on those eq, pu volume controls either.

I am waiting for some tapewound strings. The fretnoise of the round wounds is just too much. It may turn out to be not such a versitile bass as they advertised!

Let me get this straight, you bought a new bass (of your own choosing) but don't know how it works? :eyebrow:

Well now this bass was bought from a big refurbishment centre and sold by an ebay store. I thought I knew it, but the controls (concentric eq and volume for each pup) do nothing. So looking inside there is a Shadow pcb with mini pots attached and 2 unknown slider switches right on the pc board. So I closed up the electronics cavity and said F-it! All I could do is re-seat the Nanoflex bridge pup which also did not help. Like the Epi Ultra II Les Paul guitars this unit has a design flaw in the circuitry that can only be corrected like the guitarists do, and chuck the pcb and fill the cavity with new pots and wiring!

Sorry to hear this, bummer about the preamp in your Epi.

Replacing the onboard preamp with an ARTEC MB1 master blender board. Tone/volume pots on the stock board do nothing. Will let you know how it works out.