Can anyone educate me as to the purpose of this latching jack on my bass?

Prevent the plug from coming out unintentionally?

 

Locking 1/4'' Chassis Jacks

From the website:
"...provide stable and secure connections where accidental disconnect or shock and vibration may occur."

 

Great idea at first glance. But if you trip hard enough, that sucker is coming out, and doing a heckuva lot more damage on the way than pulling a regular jack out. I see them on some basses, even have one or two myself, but I don't like them.

 

?? I have the same jack on one of my basses and it has locked a variety of 1/4 plugs. If yours is not locking properly, it could be broken or you may have non-standard plugs.

I have mixed feeling on this sort of jack. I normally loop my cable through my strap for strain relief. It's pretty rare for my instrument cable to come unplugged by accident. Removing the plug from a locking jack requires me to pay a bit more attention to what I am doing (added hassle).

One potential benefit. The 1/4" jack on my #1 tends to make noise and be intermittent if any sort of lateral force is applied. From what I have seen, a properly functioning locking jack will prevent this problem.

A Switchcraft E12B may be a suitable non-locking sub:




E12BB (black)

 

No, it locks a normal plug ok.

 

I have one on a speaker cabinet. Someone gave a yank to get the plug out. It doesn’t lock anymore, but it works fine

 

I have one on my new Ibanez EHB. Found instructions here on TB on disabling the latch and using it as a standard output jack. Very happy with the result.

 

I've always looped my cable around the lower strap button and never had a jack come loose during a performance. This kind of jack always seemed a solution looking for a problem to me.

 

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BAD IDEA!!!!!!!!!! Two options: 1.) Jack comes whipping out of instrument causing silence and/or ground buzz. 2.) Jack stays in place causing instrument to fall over and shatter into millions of hard to re-assemble pieces.

 

I loop my cord over my strap and haven’t had any problems in 35+ years of being a bassist. I would never want one of those.

 

Keeps the cable connected to the jack if you step on the cable. Yanks out the jack instead of releasing.

 

IMHO, it's not very useful for a bass, but I could see it being beneficial for other types of mobile gear that is assumed to be permanently patched.

 

I put one of these Neutrik plugs in one of my basses that seemed to be particularly prone to cords coming out. Before I put the plug on, I never realized how hard (and what a bit of a pain) it was to get the cord out of it.

But - I can't argue that it works well and there have been a couple of times that I appreciated having it.

The Neutrik is staying in the bass!

 

As noted, I put one of these in a bass and all I can say is that it takes a lot of effort to get the plug out of the bass. You'll put your bass on the floor before a cord comes out of this Neutrik plug.

 

This is one of those examples of something that sounds like a good idea but is really a bad idea.
Short answer, it's a locking jack.
The jack itself is a good idea for a lot of things. I use them on my pedalboards/patch panels.
But if your bass/cable gets yanked really hard with a normal jack, the cable pops out. Annoying, but no major equipment failure. If your bass/cable gets yanked really hard with one of these jacks, depending on the situation, your cable is getting shredded, your bass might go flying, your pedals might go flying, etc. etc. Because that sucker is staying locked.
Locking jacks are great for speakon cables, mic cables, patch panels, etc. Not so much instruments.

 

Same.

 

In other words, they fixed it.