NBD New Bass Day: Spector Legend 5 Classic

Spector Legend 5 Classic Bass Guitar (Black Cherry Gloss).
I needed a 5'er and didn't want to keep waiting for an affordable Warwick to come up. So after doing some research on basses in that Not Cheap but Not Expensive price point, I purchased this Spector from Zzounds.
The bass was packaged well and arrived in 1 day! No damage to the box or the contents.
First impression was that the Black Cherry finish looks great. For some reason they included this cheapo-deluxe guitar cable in the guitar box with the hex wrenches. That to me cheapened the experience, I would rather have no cable than one indicating that I just bought a toy.
But I digress...the bass shape and smaller body is lovely. The neck is maple with a very thin lacquer on it. You can still feel the grain through it. A couple spots felt slightly rougher than the rest of the neck. No biggie, unless you have sensory issues. The pao ferro fret board actually looks pretty nice, you can see an attractive grain. The string spacing is pretty close; it dosen't feel much different than playing a 4. Some would hate that, but I like it.
I changed the strings right away. I went for my default DR Hi-Beams. The Spector strings sounded fine, the finish was a little rough for my preference. Plus I wanted something familiar.
The nuts on the tuner bushings were all loose! I was not happy about that, especially since my wrench took a little black paint off of one of them.
The intonation and setup was spot on! I didn't need to do a thing.
I am surprised that they still use a 6 screw panel in the back to access the battery. C'mon man, update that inconvenience. I'll definitely be adding a door
The balance of wearing this bass is really nice, contours on the front and back feel great to play. The bass is about 8.5 pounds.
The sounds: this bass uses Bartolini pickups with the Tone Pump Jr. Preamp circuit. I was never a huge fan of barts in the past, but they make sense in the bass to me. The bass has a naturally scooped sound, and the tone pump adds lows and highs only. This keeps the B String nice an TIGHT sounding. No overdrive, no clack or flop. The pickups and tone pump are VERY clean, with no buzz. It really is smart engineering. I will feed it through my SansAmp when I want some grit. One volume pot had a little noise, weird on a new bass, but it worked itself out quickly.
I like this bass and really look forward to putting it through its paces!

 

Not sure. They are Bartolini proprietary pickups for Spector. But the website doesn't sat their County of origin.

 

I'm sure that someone in the Spector club would know, but there is not enough information on Spector's website for me to know. These ones sound very good to my ears. A different voicing than my other basses, which was one of the appealing aspects of it.

 

@AGENT
"Bartolini humbuckers
The Legend 5 Classic comes loaded with a set of custom-wound Bartolini humbuckers built exclusively for Spector. These dual-coil pickups deliver unmatched note articulation and balance. The bridge pickup yields a higher output and resonant peak for enhanced high-end response, while the neck pickup is wound slightly lower to better complement the bridge pickup. The wide range of tones that these pickups exhibit is well-suited for any playing style.

TonePump Jr. active preamp
The Legend 5 Classic comes equipped with a proprietary preamp circuit derived from the much-discussed Petr Michalík TonePump. Every TonePump Jr. is built using good-sense engineering and is ear tested, by Petr himself, for sound and context. Its 12dB of highly interactive bass and treble shaping equip the Legend 5 Classic for just about any style of music you’re likely to encounter."