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Simplest amp

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Just get yourself one of these, GSS Baby Sumo, 600W / 4Ohm. About 300 $/€

GSS-Baby-Sumo-electric-bass-and-guitar-power-amp-Guitar-Sound-Systems-zoom.png
 
You CAN NOT run a passive Behringer DI into a power amp rack, particularly a Crown, and get very good results. Nor your passive bass nor even really an active bass. You will get a sound but you will not get a powerful sound; that's an input mismatch if I ever saw one, Crown is notorious for having voltage-hungry input. I actually did this just the other day, running my Sire V7 into a Dayton Audio DSP plate amp. With the input sensitivity set to maximum, and boosting the EQ +6dB on the bass, it wasn't enough to keep up with a rock band. I had to engage the microphone preamp built into the power amp. Most of them don't have that feature.
You need a great deal of gain to get a signal generated by passive transformers into shape for a power section to receive and successfully output real dynamics. There are a lot of things on the market that do this, from mic preamps to pedals.

Learn how to build a preamp pedal with enough gain to drive a power amp, and with a *fixed* EQ that you choose; you design the resistor/capacitor filter that works for you, solder it together, leave it in the box with no knob, or put it in the instrument.
Not recommending tube circuits, just a 9V pedal. Anyone could learn how to do this.

This is all true. It's not that hard to get to line level. An OP-amp with no filtering or tone controls of any time, you could learn to design in a few hours of reading, probably. You need to fully understand ohm's law and negative feedback biasing, that's pretty much it.

Then again you don't have to design anything yourself at all even if you want to DIY. These sorts of designs have been done thousands of times. I did a quick Google search for "DIY line driver pedal kit" and the first non-amazon result looks like it would Invalid Link Removed. You can see form the photos there's not much to it, and there's more designs on more websites where that came from.

The problem is getting your clean pre-section into the same box as your clean power section. That makes cabling so much more convenient for everyone but it's a significantly more complicated project. Not many commercially available options here, sorry OP. I like the look of that Quilter, the controls that ARE there make sense.
 
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MarkBass MoMark with the preamp module of your choice, plus the EQ0 and M0 modules. 2 knobs (gain, volume) and a mute button if you want it.
However I must mention that the modules got discontinued over a decade ago and are pretty hard to find these days (I've been looking for quite awhile but won't give up the dream).
 
So...it seems the ideal scenario is:
- buy a power amp, like the Baby Sumo
- use a preamp pedal to get tone control and line level.

This way, you can entirely change the tone without changing the amp.....and have cheap backup.

Have both Sadowsky and Aguilar for the price of a pedal
 
This looks good, but why is this so much bigger than a Baby Sumo?
The GR contains a bass-centric preamp, while the Baby Sumo does not. It is still a very compact unit.
Also, it's cheaper to reuse an enclosure and not punch hole in the faceplate than to create a new one. You still need real estate for the IEC power connector, two Speakons and XLR DI. The Baby Sumo only has the single Speakon and no DI.
 
The GR contains a bass-centric preamp, while the Baby Sumo does not. It is still a very compact unit.
Also, it's cheaper to reuse an enclosure and not punch hole in the faceplate than to create a new one. You still need real estate for the IEC power connector, two Speakons and XLR DI. The Baby Sumo only has the single Speakon and no DI.

Ok. I use DI preamp pedals
 
So.........folks

No having a single bass amp with a million knobs doesn't mean you don't like tone - actually it is the opposite.

If you really like tone control, you will use:
- a power amp
- different pre-amp pedals to adjust tone.

Power amp + pre-amp pedals gives you the greatest tone control per $ spent
 
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