OK, I'm digging up a really old thread... Was looking for info,really, but as others seem to be doing the same, I thought I might as well share what I can say about them...
I have one of these basses, it was a present from my best friend, some 27 years ago, and it wasn't really brand new back then. I think it must have been about ten years old at the time, which would date it around 1975.
For what it's worth, here's what I have to say about it:
I wouldn't swap it for a Fender. I usually say I wouldn't swap it for four Fenders... Maybe the emotional value is at play here, but this is a real quality instrument whatsoever. I currently own eight basses, this one was the cheapest of all (well, in terms of the price I paid, anyway), but it is nonetheless the best one to my feeling. I have a Fender hybrid (Precision Plus body with Precision Lyte neck), and it comes nowhere near to the quality of the Pearl bass. Only flaw on this Pearl is the quality of the pickups, although I'm not even certain about that, because I replaced the neck pickup some fifteen years ago, back when I didn't have too much money or knowledge of guitars, with the one from my first bass, which was a plywood piece of junk by the name of Olympic... Funny detail: the spacing of the pickup screws is not the same as on Fenders... one norm is 75mm, the other is 73mm (I don't remember which is which, but I remember the figures from looking for a replacement from Fender itself, which didn't fit my bass - nor my wallet back then...)
Still, this bass sounds really nice, in any pickup combination, but especially well with all knobs fully open. It's very clear-sounding, very useable for slapping for instance. The flaw to me is the light hissing when using the neck PU on it's own. But then again, this pickup comes from a really cheap Olympic (new price in 1981 was the equivalent of 100 euros...) and I'm not an electronics champion...
The neck is a deep D-profile, quite narrow (37mm at the nut) but thick for my small hands. Very nice binding on the fingerboard, still perfect after more than 30 years. Perfect fretjob too. Perfectly well playable neck, certainly considering its age and the conditions in which this bass has been kept...not exactly five-star hotels...
I also have a near-identical but thinner neck lying around, more of a shallow C-profile, labelled "Vorg by Pearl", which I have to refret before I graft it to a Mexican Precision body. I'd rather put it on the Pearl, but I can't get myself to take this bass apart, even though the thickness of the neck is the only obstacle that keeps me from playing it more... I'll see when I have refretted the neck.
Overall outstanding build quality (the neck pickup is the only part which isn't original, after all this time!), and a good sounding bass too. I'm on the lookout for other pickups, just to see if I could make it even better? But it is already more than ok like it is.
Anyways, it is definitely the last bass I would let go of, and the first one I would pull out of a fire...
I can't tell anything about it's origins though, as I got it third- or fourth-hand way back then. But I thought it was Japanese, not Korean, and it certainly dates back to 1980 or even well before that.
Oh yeah, one last detail: it's bloody heavy... feels a bit like two Les Pauls...
