Passive/Acitve Question?

Most J's are passive (deluxe is not) and you should run it as such. Passives have no battery driven components and as such present a fairly weak signal to the amp. Actives require a battery to run the on board EQ/preamp which presents a more powerful signal to the amp. Therefore, you should run your amp in active mode to compensate. The amp usually drops the input sensitivity by -10 or -15 dB in active mode.

All that being said, you can probably get away with sending an active signal to a passive input as long as you're not playing at very high volumes or have your volume and eq sections turned up very high.

Hope this helped.
D.

 

Right.

 

I'd present things another way.
Always use passive input, unless you run run into distortion issues. Then use active input.
No reason to lose headroom when you don't need to.

 

The point of the "active" input is usually to lower the input level a bit to avoid distortion. Doesn't really matter if the bass is active or passive, only whether its output is high enough to clip the input stage of the amp.

 

Yep. That's the name of the game, whether you use a padded ("active" labeled) input, or turn down the volume knob on the bass, or use a pedal that can attenuate the level, or just play with a lighter touch.