I'll have to give those a listen.
Been meaning to write some sort of summary of my experience with the SuperBot: It's pretty cool.
Dynamic, lively, clean, and harmonically rich without sounding "voiced" in any obvious way. Feels good and responsive without compressing in any obvious way (there might be some sort of compression going on, but, at least for me, there was not an obvious tube "bounce" - definitely nothing squishy or gooey); dynamics feel huge, but at the same time the touch doesn't feel concrete hard like some SS amps can.
Really detailed without being harsh.
I usually ran the BOT into a poweramp, but tried playing it into both the master effects loop/poweramp input and the FET channel effects loop of my GBE 1200. I like the FET channel on the GBE quite a lot - I think it's one of the better SS sounds going - but running the BOT in front of it brought everything up a notch; thicker but still clear, more lively, more harmonically interesting. This surprised me, as, listening to the BOT on its own, there is, again, nothing obviously colored/EQed/compressed about it -- it could be mistaken for a (really wonderful) solid state sound, but hearing it in and out of the circuit with a SS head I really like showed that it is doing something special.
Don't know that I could improve on the voicing switches without making them into multi-position boosts or a full-on EQ. They were useful live, but you're not going to dial in a huge, dubby pillow with it. On the other hand, I could palm-mute and play over the neck and get very big, bassy sounds that way - not the same as doing it with EQ, and not as potentially extreme, but more nuanced and with a broader range of variation than you might think - and a lot of fun to play.
I didn't try running effects in front of it, but I did run my passive 4 string (my main bass, played in all of the recordings) and a couple of hot, active sixers through it and it handled everything just fine.
Jonathan and I talked a bit about this BOT vs. the original. This one is better balanced, cleaner, and more detailed and dynamic. It's a better box overall. The older one had a certain rough edge to it, though, a certain rawness that I found really appealing, especially when paired with my MAS 112. The newer one has some of that, but it's more subtle and better controlled. Still in the top few most lively boxes of any kind that I've played. I don't know if Jonathan's planning on any further tweaks to the thing, but we did ruminate on those differences a bit (or he politely indulged me).
Niggles - I can only find two:
1) There is a TON of available gain with this thing. I think that it could drive a small speaker. It has enough juice to overload whatever comes after it, if you try. But that might be a necessary product of whatever gives it its great dynamics. I don't know. Maybe it's one of those "with great power comes great responsibility" things.
2) The stepped gain and treble boosts are completely transparent in that they introduce no noise when engaged - nothing that I could detect, anyway. The inductor-based bass boost introduces the tiniest amount of hum. It's so small that I feel guilty mentioning it - still quieter (sometimes significantly so) than a number of other, nice amps and preamps at idle, with or without their EQs engaged, and still a beautiful signal with a good level to FOH (thumbs up from the soundman) and for recording. Didn't notice it until I was flipping switches at home and listening for noise, and don't notice it when playing, even quietly. From talking with Jonathan, I gather that this is a necessary result of using the inductor (correct me if I'm wrong), and that approach sounded the best.
Original BOT was great, but the tiniest bit loose in the lows. It matched especially well with my MAS 112, which has a tight-but-extended low end and a slightly rising midrange. The SBot proto sounded good with everything - every bass, every cab. It does seem to have a special synergy with the 112, though - or maybe I just had an especially good night with it. I can't remember if I mentioned it here (I did in the Big E thread), but the first gig I took it on (with my P/J and the MAS 112), the club manager came out afterward to check out my rig and said, "The bass sounded sick all night, just sick." I've played that club several times before and gotten compliments but this was the first time that happened.
Use as a preamp: Totally viable. You could do a lot with this and nothing else in the chain but a poweramp, cables, and a cab. And not messing with EQ was freeing. That said, I'd probably, eventually want more EQ. Maybe I could live without, though - would need to play it over time and in a variety of settings to know for sure. Regardless, if Jonathan ever did develop a rack pre based on this, I bet it'd be pretty cool. I didn't try running an EQ pedal in front of the BOT (don't have one), but it did respond well to the GBE's EQ when in the FET effects loop.
and had heard the original BoT proto).
