Nope, different woods and bridges impact the sound tremendously. Add in different pickups and electronics and they do vary a lot. Plus they have different neck shapes and that can be critical to most players. Plus there's a lot of folks for whom appearance really does matter- I've seen people pass up great instruments because it wasn't a sunburst, or it wasn't black with gold hardware...
An American Standard sounds brighter and edgier to me than my (albeit 27 years old) Vintage Series '62. And when I bought that bass 27 years ago, it sound WAY different than any regular Precision I'd seen in the previous eight years (and I was a Fender dealer then, so I'd seen a LOT of Precisions). Plus the neck shape on the VS '62 is a lot different than the VS '57, and both are quite different from the American Standard, etc.
Maybe not "much more" but "much different" is the key. I LIKE the sound of an alder body with a vintage style bridge and the softer sound of the VS pickups. I also treasure the '62 neck profile- very wide side-to-side but very shallow front-to-back. That's an important distinction (and I don't think the non-Fullerton VS '62 even have that profile any more). They're all different because people want different things. Having been a Fender dealer and working at guitar stores for a long time, I'm still baffled by the current reverence for '70s Fenders, but that's the market. FMIC makes a lot of different ones so they can meet customers' wants. That's a far cry from the '70s when they only offered one Precision, and your choices were cosmetics, maple or rosewood (to me essentially a cosmetic choice) and whether it had frets or not. Yeah, you COULD order it with different neck widths, but that was pretty unknown at the time. Now you have all those Precisions you listed, plus some (you left out the Sting Signature series, and the 1954 version of the Precision is different from the '51 version due to the body contours).
Well, that's the learning curve we all gotta go through. You play a lot of different ones, take notes, and pay attention. Ask questions and do research so you KNOW what model you're playing. And play a LOT of them. It takes some time to get to know what YOU want. I had a '73 P for a long time. Got it used in '76 and it was my only bass until '79, and my only P until 1983. I got it because it was the only used P in town when I needed a good bass. After several years of playing it and trying different things (strings, bridges, PUPs), I finally learned that I hated that P. Not all Precisions, but that one. It was all attack, sustain, a big "blaaat" instead of a warm blossoming note. It was more like Simonon of The Clash than like Duck Dunn or Jamerson. But when I bought it in '76 I didn't know those things. It was a P, it had a stable neck, so it was OK. As my experiences grew, I learned what was inherent in that bass' sound that I didn't like. So my next Precision was bought because I had a much better expectation of what I wanted.
I ultimately bought mine because that individual chunk of wood and metal said "Hi, honey, I'm home!!" when I first played it. I didn't buy it because it was a VS '62, or because it was the newest version, or anything else. In fact, I wasn't a fan of Lake Placid Blue, but thought I wanted the '57. However, when I played one unamplified note on that LBP '62 P in April 1983 when I opened up our latest shipment from Fender, I KNEW this was the bass for me.
Same thing with my Sting. I knew I'd wanted a single-coil Precision, and the contoured body was more comfortable than the slab body of the '51 versions. But still it was playing one note on the individual Sting that made me buy THAT bass.
For me, that trumps everything. If I don't get that connection with the bass, I've learned there's no point wasting time or money to modify it into something else. My tool box has seven basses in it, and they're all keepers because they just sounded right from the first note.
BTW, natural finish and black pickguard are totally unimportant to me. That's cosmetic and can be changed. While I prefer natural wood showing through, and find 'burst to be kinda boring, I've got a Lake Placid Blue bass, a black one, two 'bursts, and two with transparent amber. None were purchased because of the finishes, all were purchased because of the sound. And I can always change the pickguard...
John
