This forum draws a lot of gear hounds who are about the Next New Thing, ultralight/kilowatt stage rigs, or else unimpeachably cool classic gear.
Peavey (one of the all-time meat and potatoes brands) designs most of its bass line to appeal to working Joes rather than gear nuts. As a result, it doesn't draw a lot of public praise here at TB, except in the occasional thread like this ("hey, I just played a backlined gig through an old Peavey/Hartke rig, and it was surprisingly good").
You can cover a lot of gigs with a decent blue-collar rig and sound great doing it. But TB thrives on a quest-for-tone narrative, so learning to get the sound you want out of your first decent rig runs against the spirit of the place.
I'm going to half-disagree with this.
Meat and potatoes gear for working players, absolutely. Good at what it does, yes.
The best tone out there? It's a valid question, and I think for many people there may be better tonal options. It depends what you like.
The thing is, though, that if your sound comes from the PA, and your bass is fed to PA via a DI, what role does the amp tone have?
You can also be suckered by brand. I've played through various more expensive rigs and not liked what they did.
It also depends on circumstance. I want a natural tone for upright and a highly colored tone for electric. Peavey plus SansAmp on electric gives me that.

