I started playing bass in the late 80's at around 14 years old. My first 4 basses that I owned were all passive and were cheap but each one got significantly better and higher quality. In 1994, I had just purchased my first Ibanez bass and loved it. It was an Ibanez Soundgear SR 400 in Candy Apple Red. To get it, I had to trade off both of my other basses. A Charvel 2B I think it was and an Epiphone by Gibson. Both of those basses were really good basses too but I had always wanted an Ibanez and the SR 400 was too good to pass up. About a year later in 1994, I was at Guitar Center, the same store where I had bought my SR 400 and the salesman that I had always worked with showed me a higher end Ibanez model. The Soundgear SR 500 that was active. I had no clue at the time what he meant by that other than it took a 9 volt battery but he sat down and showed me it and how it compared to my SR 400. It had an active eq and was much more versatile. It also was not that much more expensive. So I put it on layaway and bought it a month later. I still have the bass and every bass since it has been active. I just prefer them a lot more over passive basses. In fact, most passive basses I simply don't care for. I'm not saying they are bad basses I just don't like the tones I normally get from them. To me, I love the actives because with the eq, you can really do some pretty neat things and not just have a tone control knob. In fact, with a lot of my basses, if I choose too, I can almost get a passive sound out of them if I eq them right. I now use Music Man basses and the versatility with them compared to my Ibanez basses is night and day. With the Ibanez ones, I only notice a slight increase or decrease when messing with the eq on the bass but with the Music Man basses, It really fluctuates giving me even more versatility and control over a room that may need to be eq'd a certain way because of how the room is set up.
