I put in the opening bid on this TRB6II on eBay. Didn't think I'd get it, but I did...$650. My favourite colour too!
Yeah, I remember reading about it years ago on alt.bass or rec.music or whatever those things were. You swapped out the preamp for a Bartolini Tobias one. My "real" rig isn't here, so I only got to hear this TRB6II bass through the Pandora, and I like the preamp. It has the hiss when you turn up the treble, and it has no center detents, even on the pickup blend (!), but overall I think I like it. It's pretty smooth. I have plenty of other basses that will do the aggressive thing.
It actually does have center detents, they're of the safecracker variety... very subtle and easy to miss. I never got the Bart to work in that bass (thanks, Chuck's ). I've decided to only keep basses that sound right woth my rig set flat, I could fix the sound of the TRB6II but I didn't want to have to. Excellent playing bass but I have the 635 so I really don't miss it
I had the same thing happen when Matt Schmill sent me a Bart preamp to install in a bass I bought from him. I took it to a shop, and the guy charged me $125 to install it. The treble control didn't work, and it was very noisy. The installer guy was really arrogant about it and said that maybe there was something wrong with the preamp, and he refused to give me a refund. That changed after I filed a complaint with the BBB. I can't believe anybody would give a bass back with the preamp in that condition. But it happens, eh? I used half of the refunded money to send it back to Matt for the install and used the other $60 on beer.
The schmuck who installed mine was... well I'll give you an example. When I came to pick up the bass after he spent 6 weeks trying to get it to work, after I tried the bass and found that of the 3 EQ bands, none worked properly. The bass control worked backward, the mid did nothing, the treble added hiss only. He suggested that maybe I wasn't hearing the bass correctly and when I demonstrated the non-working mid control, suggested that maybe it was "subtle". I asked him how a + or - 10dB sweep in it's frequency range could be subtle. No answer. I should have done it myself. I got tired of fooling with the bass by then and sold it.
