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Mesa Subway Plus preamp

#261
hensonbass said:
Mine arrived today. I plugged my upright with a Yamahiko pickup directly into the preamp and got a wonderful tone with very little eq’ing.

This preamp is killer. I wish I got this years ago.
Click to expand...
There you go, simple and straight ahead solution!
 
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#268
I have used my Subway + preamp this week for five gigs and one recording session. Most of these gigs were played with a fully carved upright bass fitted with a Yamahiko pickup going through a PA system. The only exception is my church gig where I play a Fender five string jazz bass monitored through an in-ear rig.

This is the by far the best preamp I have ever owned by a wide margin. It kills my EBS Microbass 3 preamp, my Tech21 Q- strip, and MXR M81 bass pre.

The pickup on my upright has a tendency to drive the input stage of a preamp too hard and fart out. This is not the case with the Mesa. It stays clean and clear at pretty much at any setting unless you turn it past 3 o’clock, and even then when overloading it still kind of sounds musically gritty. I imagine it’s sort of similar to the old style mixing board mic preamp overdriving kind of tone. Anyway, there is tons of headroom no matter what instrument you plug in.

When playing my upright I love flipping the deep switch on and then bringing the HPF filter up to about 10 o’clock. From there I didn’t have to mess around much with the EQ section. The tone stays big, full and articulate with no excessive low end build up in the PA system.

In the recording studio I ran a DI line out pre-fader to the mixing desk and also had an unbalanced line out run through the effect loop of a Markbass head / 2x10 cab to monitor because it was just a live in the room recording session. The engineer was super impressed with the quality of sound. I prefered the Mesa preamp tone compared to the Avalon DI that was there.

My passive Fender five jazz through the Mesa pre into an in ear rig at church sounded really beefy and sweet. Once again no eq was needed to hear myself clearly.

I really love this ‘minimal eq needed’ vibe of this preamp.
 
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#270
Dumb question (tried to access Mesa's website to see the manual, but can't get to the page?):

For the FX loop, does the preamp EQ hit before or after?

In other words, would the signal chain be:

Preamp >>> FX Loop >>> DI Out or

FX Loop >>> Preamp >>> DI Out?

Or does the Source Pre/Post EQ switch cover that?

Thanks in advance!
 
#276
I have not heard that the decision to discontinue these has actually been made. Currently they are out of stock in part because of (continuing) parts shortages and in part because we are still backlogged elsewhere (though it's getting better).
 
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#277
agedhorse said:
I have not heard that the decision to discontinue these has actually been made. Currently they are out of stock in part because of (continuing) parts shortages and in part because we are still backlogged elsewhere (though it's getting better).
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Interesting the way you phrased the response...So there is a decision on the table to be made?? I hope I can get my hands on one before they are discontinued. These are great preamps...sorry I sold mine.
 
#278
Lovep said:
Interesting the way you phrased the response...So there is a decision on the table to be made?? I hope I can get my hands on one before they are discontinued. These are great preamps...sorry I sold mine.
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We have been playing catch-up for 18 months now, the amount of our limited resources spent trying to work around parts shortages and extremely long lead times (I have seen parts with lead times of 60 weeks and varying by the month, making scheduling ridiculously difficult) have caused us to focus on products that had long back-order times with large quantities.

Manufacturing the past few years has been entirely different than anytime within my 40+ years of experience, all the old rules fell out the window.
 
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#279
agedhorse said:
We have been playing catch-up for 18 months now, the amount of our limited resources spent trying to work around parts shortages and extremely long lead times (I have seen parts with lead times of 60 weeks and varying by the month, making scheduling ridiculously difficult) have caused us to focus on products that had long back-order times with large quantities.

Manufacturing the past few years has been entirely different than anytime within my 40+ years of experience, all the old rules fell out the window.
Click to expand...

My day job is in IT and telecommunications. Parts shortage is meaning some of our IT vendors having lead times of 24 month on some items, by which time that item will well and truly be obsolete and superceded - it's insane.
 
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