Alien Bass Station (ABS) - Anyone experiences any issue?

[BadBilly]

Hi everyone,

I have been using Alien Bass Station (ABS) for almost an year. Recently I found that the compressor portion is not stable. Sometimes when I switch it on, the bass signal suddenly seems so weak that no compression would be triggered, and the output level is very weak as well. Then I stump it to switch it on / off back and forth, it would act normal sometimes as my usual setting, but sound weak sometimes. To be brief, when I switch in on and off repeatedly without changing the setting, the output sound level is not consistent, sometimes normal sometimes weak. However if it is weak when turned on, it stays like that until I switch it off. So I am pretty sure it does not relate to my cable or wiring. Has anyone had similar experience?

BTW I was not really gigging heavily with it, only to bring it to the road around every other month depending on the music I play. Until recently I include it as a regular member of my pedal board powered by Cioks DC5. Not sure if that matters but put the info here as a reference. Thanks for watching and welcome suggestions if any.

 

[DDXdesign]

My apologies that I can't help you, but I know that pedal and for the 3 or 400 bucks it costs, you should definitely get in touch with alien audio about that. It does not sound normal. That said, always isolate the issue to the pedal - take everything out of the chain besides the ABS, make sure your bass has fresh batteries if it's active, make sure your cables are all good (wiggle them a bunch while sending a note through at least), and make sure your Cioks is producing consistent power on all its outlets.

Good luck!

 

[Soundworks]

I had a similar issue with mine recently and it was new out of the box. It stopped happening ... the folks who sold it to me suggested it might have something to do with power supply (I am using voodoo lab pedal power plus 2) but since it seemed to resolve itself, i haven't touched it... just played it... i love it but will prob try to record the sound next time it happens and send a clip - will post it here as well.

 

[BadBilly]

Update about my original issue, and I think I should do this to make it fair to Analog Alien...

First of all, I had moved out of the US before I found my previous addressed issue. Therefore I didn't even try to contact Analog Alien cuz I don't want to deal with the hassle of international shipping. I simply put it on my shelf and didn't use it for a long while.

Weeks ago, I got a break between my gigging days so I decide to give it another chance. This time after switching on the Compressor part, there is obvious scratching noise along with the bass sound. Very similar to the noise coming from a faulty cable. When I touch and wiggle the true bypass switch, the noise varies with it. So to me it seems a problem from the true bypass switch, and very possibly the previous problem also came from that. So I found a local repairman and swapped out the faulty true bypass switch. Then BOOM! All is good! The sound gets normal and stable. I also did one gig with it and all sounded great as it should.

To sum it up, the replacement of the true bypass switch solved the original issue. I'm glad there is nothing related to the circuit inside the pedal. Probably the switch didn't go completely dead when I found the problem firstly, hence very difficult to debug. Many thanks everyone's input still.