Active vs. passive

You're over-generalizing. There is a huge range of tones available from the many instruments that are "active". Likewise, there is an equally huge range of tones available from the many instruments that are "passive". There are cheap versions of each that should be avoided. The rest of the market represents a wide selection of quality instruments that will need to be individually evaluated for suitability.

Sorry, there is no blanket answer to your question. You'll need to go out and use your ears.

 

My first bass (86 MC924 ibanez) has two big active p-bass soapbars & I have been able to play a very similar bass(85 mc888) with passive P/J setup. There are big differences. For a while I wanted to switch the pickups to passive on the 86 to passive but have really grown fond of them; they're very responsive to playing technique & you can get a lot of sounds out of them. FTR they are active pickups with no preamp. These are just one (very early) example of EMG-style pickup.

Lots of ways to eat this Reese's

 

I guess your amp has tone controls. If you drastically change your tone settings often, the only disadvantage of a passive bass is that you'll do more walking.

 

There are only a few inherent differences between active and passive. Almost all tonal difference comes down to design specifics. For whatever reason, people love to generalize and say that active and passive sound a certain way, because there happen to be trends in how each is voiced.

 

walk that bass

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+1

from where I am understanding:

Active pickups (battery, no preamp ,lower-impedance winding) are capable of lower output impedance, which will keep your cabling (short/long/capacitance) from affecting your instrument's output ('tone'). Passive (hi-impedance) pickups can(will) interact with the electrical properties of the conductors (cables) between your guitar and amp. active pickups without boost/cut preamps still have a small preamp built into the pickup housing that boosts & buffers the signal. This allows the pickup to use a weaker signal.

I am reasonably confident in the above, what follows is conjecture: Passive pickups can be wound more and more (hotter) to increase output, at the expense of treble output (higher frequencies are dumped to ground by the extra capacitance of the windings.

I am NO EXPERT in pickup design at all, but WRT to "sludgy downtuned..." here is where EMGs might have earned a reputation:

With the exception of the Bi-sonic/Dark Star pickup, bandwidth has not been a notable feature of vintage bass pickups.EMGs using a magnetically weaker pickup allows for a more even collection of information WRT to the vibration of the string without requiring large magnets, lots of very fine copper wire, or complicated assemblies (Bi-Sonic). Whether or not there's a preamp attached, I can see how EMGs can be useful for downtuning.

 

Not always. There are two kinds of active pickups. Low impedance coils with a boost from the buffer, and standard high impedance coils with unity gain buffering.

 

Gracias! I appreciate the elaboration. Now off to market a backpack that lets you use a cathode follower for an ALL_TOOB SIGNAL PATH

 

True, but-
a weaker, more sensitive pickup with a built-in buffer/preamp can have (and some do) the same or hotter output (than a passive pickup) still retaining full clean signal.

 

Exactly, and it will have access to an abundance of high-frequency information that may have struggled to make it across a passive set-up. But a full clean signal is a far cry from many 'classic' sounds.

 

If you play any bass and you can't get a good sound out of it, I ain't blaming the bass