• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

Anybody tried a BBE BMax pre-amp

#106
Steve Bennett said:
To me it just sounds like an extra set of bass and treble controls, so that's how I use it.
Click to expand...
Me too. The 'lo contour' boosts REAL low, like 40hz or something. The 'process' knob brings up some fairly high highs.

mjolnir said:
I am now a proud owner of one of these suckers, and I'm thoroughly pleased with everything on it, especially that compression, very smooth.
Click to expand...
Agreed, the compression acts like all compressors should IMO. And ONE knob! Doesn't get any simpler than that.
 
#107
Been following this thread lately..... thinking of trading off my Eden Navigator for something simpler....

Went to a local pro sho and checked out a used BBE Bmax SS.

I really put this thing through its paces. I played the pre through a headphone amp and quality phones... to give me an idea about recorded sound.... ( this is much the same sound that comes out of my Bergantino's... shameless plug I know...), I also ran it through a Mesa 410, and an Eden xlt410. I used a Passive J bass (the Squier Vintage Vibe, which I quickly preferred to the MIM Fender Jazz Standard), and a Modulus Quantum 5.

First Impression was WOW she's clear.... and crisp! I started with the eq flat ( 2 - 10 - 2 ), Sonic maximizer off, comp off. The flat tone on this was great. I mean really good. Sounded so good thru the phones all I needed to do was back off the Squier's tone control just a touch and I was home. Amplified it didnt sound quite so nice. Different cabinets being what they are.... with the Bridge pickup solo'd on the J, it sounded thin and weak. All the midrange sweetness was there, just no real "oomph". EQ Time!!

This is where I started to run into trouble. The EQ knobs run from 1 - 10 (or 7 oclock to 5 oclock). From 2 on up, the bass and treble controls seem to run through their entire gain range in the first quarter turn of the knob. Bass ramps WAY WAY up very quickly between "2" and "5". The last half of its range seems to do nothing at all.... both amplified and thru phones I could detect no difference in the bass or treble range running the knobs anywhere between "5" and "10". They were either ON or OFF seemingly.

Now for the Passive Mids. This knob was very very smooth, and I could hear it doing its thing regardless of other EQ settings. Even all the way off, the pre still has plenty of midrange coming thru, even with the Para-Mids off. This has much to do with the interactive, wide Q nature of the Fender / Baxandall tone stack. I also realized that with the passive mid all the way off, the second half of the bass knob's range starts to work.... where previously I could hear no difference past a certain setting, I could now hear a smooth taper all the way through the range. Same with the treble.

Para-Mids: This worked exactly as it should, and was the only worry free part of the circuit for me. With Bass and Treble at "2", passive mids almost all the way down, and +3 or 4 on the para mids at 600Hz.... I was in Jaco-Town. And I mean super clean, super clear, very pleasing Jaco-town. Bass up just a little from flat, treble flat, "Bright" switch turned on and para-mids at -4 or -5 at 300hz... we had Clean Ampeg SVT like love love!!

Here's where the love ends. I could really find no setting I liked with the passive mids anything but close to, or all the way off when amplified. Attempts at notching out the badness with the para-mids failed. Having the passive mid all the way up effectively turns your bass and treble controls into ON/OFF switches, and renders the Para-mids all but useless.... as cutting does almost nothing and boosting results in an array of exclusively BAD sounds. That said, with the passive mid OFF or close to it and bass & treble boosted slightly, the Para-Mids can be used to find a lot of great tones. Boosting Bass or Treble too much brings you to a totally over-scooped sound I didnt care for at all. Again the overriding concern was that this thing was EXTREMELY touchy... and I found myself constantly fiddling.... If I boosted treble just a little I had to also adjust the passive mids, which forced me to adjust bass, and then find the resulting offensive frequencies and remove them with the Para Mids.

Sonic Maximizer: Now this has always been heralded as one of the few EQ gimmicks that actually works, and it is. Although the basic interpretation is just a bass and treble boost, it is more than that. What it is exactly I cant say. That said, this control did little to help the too much scoop of too little nature of the previous eq section. I left it alone.

Compressor: Like some of the most well designed units (including my Eden Navigator), the comp is the first thing in the circuit, directly after the input, before the gain control. Turning up gain does not make it trip faster. I'm one of those fingerstyle players who finds some type of compression invaluable. I'm not a huge fan of the soft-knee optical comps, unless they are very well made. Surprisingly, this is actually one of the best single-control units Ive heard lately. Turning the knob up (clockwise) lowers threshold and increases ratio. With the passive J plugged into the passive input jack... I couldnt get it to trip until it was 3 quarters of the way up. Even with the hot Modulus in the passive jack it still was more than halfway up before it tripped. No problem tho, becuase as soon as it does engage, the comp does its job wonderfully... smoothly evening out pops and making my right hand technique sound way better than it actually is :rolleyes:. After that, and at any settings more extreme than the point where it begins to trip during normal playing, this control begins to follow suit with the rest of the circuit... WAY TOO TOUCHY!! Turning it up just a little results in slightly stronger (yet still very musical) compression, but there the comp begins to fall apart... leading edge transients pass over the threshold with an audible "pop", and the comp seems to turn on too late and let go too soon. Turn it up ever so slightly more and it starts to give you really strange and very unpleasant release characteristics... A thump on the low-E will result in something like this:

POPummmmummmmummmmummmm

Extremely jagged and almost "tiered" release. Not at all smooth. Like the SM, I left it off.

This pre obviously has been built with extremely quality components, and is as clear and crisp as anything Ive ever heard. I would not hesitate to use this as a recording interface, since it can be used to ever so subtly tweak tone going into the recording interface, and more precise sculpting can be done later. Its PRISTINE in this setting and doubtless very useful. I left thinking it may still be a good unit to have in the desk rack at the studio. Especially at $125 used.

For a live setting, I'm definetly going to pass. By the time you get one EQ band sounding the way you want, you have to readjust every other band to compensate... and then the band you started with doesnt sound right anymore either. Getting the right amplified tone out of this thing is as much a chore as doing a complete setup on a bass. Once you get all the strings in tune, you see you have too much relief in the neck, once you adjust the neck relief you have to bring the strings back into tune, once you do that, you see your intonation is off, once you fix that, you have to adjust your saddle height, once you do that you have to retune and adjust relief again. To get a perfect setup and nice low action, you've gotta repeat this nonsense 2 or 3 times till its right. Tone sculpting on the BBE is a lot like that. At least for this bassist.

Many people will find a tone that works quite well for them right away with this preamp. If you remember, in the first paragraph, I found a pretty sweet tone right off the rip. The problem arises when adjusting for different rooms or different bands. I can easily see myself struggling with this thing for 10 minutes or better just to compensate for high ceilings or a hollow stage.

Thats my $0.02

:cool:
 
#108
Anyone looking to pick up a BMAX-T cheap, there are 5 of them for sale on eBay for $379 each. These are new units that include a full 5 year warranty. I emailed the seller and it is not a misprint.

I do not benefit in any way from this, I just thought I would pass along a good deal. I was tempted to pick one up, but I have other items on my current wish list.
 
#109
This seems like a good BMAX thread, so I thought I'd post here.

I got a used BMAX yesterday. My initial impressions are that the inherent tone of the amp definitely sounds mid-scooped and perhaps a little bass heavy. That's with the EQ at 2-10-2 like the manual suggests. The Para Mid control can boost some Mids, though, and that seems to help. Boosting Mids at 375Hz sounded good, although it seemed to make it sound even more bassy, so I adjusted the Mid Frequency up to around 800Hz, and that seemed like it added Mids and definition without increasing the Lows. At least those are my thoughts so far...
 
#111
There are some great reviews in this thread, so I'm not going to bother doing a full write-up. I'll just summarize. Speaker cabs were a sealed 2.6 cubic foot with a Peavey Pro 15, and a current version Avatar B212 neo with crossover bypassed. Bass was a '73 Ric with just the treble pickup, and the pickup wired right to the output jack. Strings: dead Rotosounds. I do mostly C&W work and this is generally what I bring to the party.

QC:

My unit has one very slightly bent control shaft. It's not bad, but it's noticeable when you spin the knob. The control works okay, however, so I'm not going to return this unit. There was no evidence of physical impact to the unit itself or to its packaging.

NOISE:

The unit outputs a small bit of hum, and it's not really affected by any of the controls, nor is it affected by the unit's proximity to or orientation toward the power amp. The hum does NOT increase as volume is increased. In a live setting, not a problem. But the hum renders the unit useless in a studio unless you're going to gate the channel. However, these days most people are using plug-ins anyway, or at least already have on hand the physical hardware necessary to process BG tracks, so I don't see ever bringing this to a session. By comparison, my BBE 383 is dead silent.

Edit #1: I tried swapping amps, and the noise problem is nowhere near as bad now. In fact, the unit is pretty quiet with the replacement amp. Strangely, the first amp isn't noisy with other preamps. Wish I could explain this -- I mean with something other than conjecture. I need to feed the XLR out to a mixer and check the noise level with headphones. I'll try to get to it later today.

MAXIMIZER:

The maximizer works as others have stated, but I really don't have a use for it, so I played with it for a while and then shut it off.

COMPRESSOR:

I hardly ever use a compressor, but I'd give this one a 7 out of 10, as far as on-board compressors go. It does the job and mostly stays out of the way if you adjust it only to lop off the peaks. I didn't attempt to use it to throttle the dynamics severely; I think other compressors do a better job of that. As far as single-knobbers go, I slightly prefer the compressor in my Carvin BX250 and MB15, but if you were to force me to blind A/B them in a live setting, I guarantee you I'd never be able to tell them apart.

AVATAR RESULTS:

Set up 2/10/2 (close to flat), results into the Avatar were as expected. The sound mimicked everything else I own that I set flat and run into the same cab. (This is how I run this cab, since its bass extension is already plenty for me and it seems to have no peaks that I need to watch out for.)

PEAVEY RESULTS:

Set up the same way into the sealed Peavey cab, same deal: as expected. However, this Peavey cab rolls right off below 100 Hz, where there's an insignificant 1 dB peak. This cab sounds thin by nature, so what I usually try to do is mate it with preamps that are able to kick up the sub-100 but leave 100 and above alone. I've had good success with anything GK, since the GK bass controls work around 60, and I've also had good success with the 383, whose lowest control runs in the same region. (As another point of comparison, my BDDI's bass control seems to work in a higher range -- I'm guessing somewhere between 75 and 125, with not much below that. Bad match to this cab, but a great partner with the Avatar, which needs no extreme-bottom end reinforcement but, depending on circumstances, likes a bit of upper-bass boost, which the BDDI delivers.)

Now, as for the BBE with this cab, with a different tone setting, WOW. Treble off, mid off, bass around 2 or 3, and this cab was able to produce some good low end without having its mid-bass peaked as the price for it. I think the other preamps' bass controls slightly encroached on that mid-bass region, and so with them I was getting deep bass but at the expense of a slightly boosted mid-bass. This preamp seems to be able to raise the E string's fundamentals without affecting its harmonics' volume in the least. This is the first time I've gotten a nice, deep, even sound out of this cab without resorting to a third-octave graphic. Slick.

The only thing that worries me about that capability at that setting is the potential for trouble with subsonics. The specs say this thing is almost flat to 15 Hz, and they claim 16 dB of boost at 40 Hz. (I'm assuming that's shelving and not peaking, which would mean that that same boost -- or close to it -- would continue all the way down to 15, and that some boost would still be present below that.) It's for certain, therefore, that I'd not want to run this combination at any significant volume without having a subsonic filter between the BBE and the power amp; WinISD shows I bottom out this driver at 10 Hz with just 20 watts, and come close to it all the way up to 80 Hz. But the situation is far worse with a vented cab, which is what this one used to be: Xmax trouble shows up at 20 Hz with only 2 watts, according to WinISD's model of this cab's vented configuration. Is this something I don't understand about WinISD? Perhaps. But in the meantime, with this preamp I'd strongly encourage the use of a steep sub filter in every possible scenario, with the exception of solo practice, with the vented configurations needing it the most.

Well, that's it. Hope I haven't duplicated too much of what's already been said.
 

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back