What happened? It seams so dead here.
Simple: The excitement was generated by the extreme ATK model blowouts of a few months ago.
That feeding frenzy's over, so everyone's gone back to sleep.
And right now when I am in love more and more with my ATK?
I think the honeymoon's probably over for a bunch of the new buyers and they're off on new quests for gear excitement. It is with me.
The ATKs I bought were OK, but they're really not for
me. They're in storage awaiting eventual profitable resale after the economy stabilizes. That's the neat thing about blowouts -- you can experiment with new gear you've never tried before and if you don't like it, you can get out of it with new knowledge and a little extra money for your trouble.
I've been doing that for over forty years.
My summation of why I personally reject these particular ATKs (700 & 750) is mainly that
they're just too big and too heavy. There's just no getting around that. I also think the fat necks aren't properly cured and are still too unstable, even with all those laminations. I have also decided that as a mature musician, I have reached the vomit point with do-nothing decorative top laminates on instruments, on principle. If the native blank isn't pretty enough for natural or burst, paint the blasted thing, don't cover it with acoustically-smothering plywood and glue. It's an
instrument, not a coffee table. The maple and koa tops on these are nice wood, but so what? I'm fed up with that concept as wasted geekery.
[The natural ash 300 model
is nice, though]
The problems several people here encountered with mysterious active SMT circuit failures and the ATK's lack of passive backup mode make the ATK a non-starter for me as a gigging bass. It would probably be fine, but it's not worth the risk -- even if it wasn't too heavy for me, which unfortunately it is.
The ATK is an interesting bass that would work for a lot of people, but it's just another one of the growing number of basses I'm accumulating that have no real purpose to me except as stock. It's OK as yet another mid-priced import from Cor-Tek, but it's not a particularly great instrument in the great scheme of things. I gave my 750 about the same rating as
Bass Gear did, about 3+ out of a possible 5.
) or the infamous T14(didn't that stand for "14 Tons"?
)
