BigRedX

Having contributed to the thread derailment, here's a reasonably definite answer for the OP... Pretty much any Mac made in the last 10 years will be plenty fast enough for your needs unless you are a 3D, animation or video professional. With your budget you are going to be looking at second hand, EoL or if your are lucky a refurb. A refurb from Apple is the safest option, but there is very little available to suit you budget. Currently the Apple refurb store has very little under £1k. EoL is a good fallback option - my 2012 MacBook Pro was £699 from John Lewis a few years ago. But you need to be in the right place at the right time. For me second hand is the best VFM, especially if you are prepared to collect in which case there are some serious bargains to be had. The Mac I earn my living on is a 2008 3,1 Mac Pro which cost £350 including 16GB RAM when I bought it 3 years ago. I did spend almost as much again on a replacement graphics card but that's only because I need to drive three large displays. The main problem with buying an old Mac is that there will come a point when you can no longer upgrade the OS and consequently many of the programs that you run. Even if you don't plan to upgrade the OS or your programs as you are new to Macs you may have problems buying suitable versions of your programs if the OS on your Mac is too old. Personally I wouldn't buy anything now that wasn't capable of running El Capitan and ideally Sierra. Finally there is the question of portability verse power and screen real-estate. Only the OP can answer this question, but IME the bigger the screen you have the easier it is to do anything. I use my MacBook Pro for running the backing tracks for one of my bands. However all the preparation for this is done on my desktop Mac which has nice big monitors. Trying to do anything but the most basic of tweaks to the backing on the small laptop screen is not a pleasant experience. Whatever you decide upon make sure you get as much RAM as you can afford. I'd consider 8GB to be the minimum these days. HTH.

IMO a Hackintosh completely defeats the object of having a Mac in the first place. One of the reasons why Macs tend to "just work" is that the OS only has to support a minuscule set of hardware options compared with what Windows or Linux have to contend with. The moment you try and force Mac OS to run on something other than Apple hardware you start getting all the sorts of problems and incompatibilities that other OS users have to contend with - and more because none of it is officially supported by Apple so you are very much on your own when it comes to voting out exactly why your chosen set of components won't work. The Hacktintosh is fine is a proof of concept and for people who really want to just geek about with computers, but for those of us who have chosen the Mac platform because it lets us get on with our work they are IMO a complete waste of time.

I'm sorry to say I think the bass in the OP looks minging. I'm worried about catching some incurable skin disease simply by looking at the photograph.

The cab with that 50W prototype is an open backed design which is not very good for getting a decent bass tone at anything approaching a decent volume.

Looks as hough the Schaller 8-string bridge has been discontinued, as it's no longer on their website. However Warmoth appear to still have them in stock.

Schaller make an 8-string bridge with individual saddles. Whether it will fit the Hagstrom is another matter.

Simply off eBay. You have be patient, so I started looking about a month ago when I knew the next version of Adobe CC was going to require a newer version of Mac OS than my current machine supports. I'll buy one when the price is right. A lot of Mac Pros will be collection only so that reduces the audience and the price.

@Leonard Smalls That seems quite expensive for the spec. For £500 my second hand Mac will be 12 Xeon Cores and at least 32GB RAM. Plus I'll be able to transfer all my SSDs and HDDs from my previous Mac as well as the second DVD drive. Mac Pros even though they are old are very reliable, because they spend most of their lives in a single place and are rarely moved. I'm currently on my third. My second currently does service as a file server and my first (a 2006 1.1 Mac Pro) was passed on to a professional photographer friend who still uses it as their main image editing machine.

If you are prepared to shop around and buy second hand, Macs turn out to be very good value for money. The Mac Pro which I currently use to earn my living cost me £350 when I bought it 3 years ago. The model is actually 10 years old and for most purposes is plenty fast enough for my needs. I have added a better graphics card, but that's only because my work flow requires multiple monitors (I currently run 3 x 23"). It will be replaced soon, simply because the latest version of Adobe CC requires a newer OS than my machine is capable of supporting and I will need to share files with users on the latest version. If I didn't need to do this I could see my current Mac lasting me until it suffered some catastrophic hardware failure. However, when I do replace it I expect to pay less than £500 including any memory upgrades the new Mac might require.

IMO the best upgrade you could give this Hagstrom would be a bridge where each string in the course could be individually intonated.

I think rather than flat you have to assume not deliberately coloured, which is what all bass and guitar amps and cabs are.

I get it now, but so much scrolling on smaller screens to get to the useful bits. It would have been far better to simply list all the plugins with a 1-2 line description of what they do and then clicking that takes you the relevant page for more detailed information, a video explanation and a download link. I don't think my PoV regarding linux is snobbish. It is IME simply realistic. I would love to give linux a go, but while it seems to be ideal for hard-core geeks, for anyone wanting to actually do something creative, the applications simply aren't of a suitable standard or variety. A couple of my friends have tried to dabble with linux and encountered more than fair bit of snobbery from the linux forums when just trying to get started because they didn't seem to have sufficient geek credentials and the questions they were asking made that clear. One didn't even manage to get their copy of linux installed on the PC let alone get to experiment with the applications available.

There's a really good documentary on the BBC iPlayer about the recording of the News Of The World album and subsequent US tour. Freddie Mercury has shorter hair than he did at the time of Bohemian Rhapsody but still not as short as his later "clone" look.

I would imagine that the guitar designs went through a number of prototypes with varying success until he settled on those design features. The bass model(s) will need to do the same. I wouldn't expect him to get everything right first go. The most important thing to remember is that despite outward appearances a bass guitar is not simply a normal guitar scaled up. Things that work well on a guitar are not always desirable on a bass and vice-versa. Plenty of experimentation is going to be required before he come up with a suitable bass guitar design.

I did a gig at the weekend using my Helix and RCF745 where the PA support (for reasons only known to the engineer) was intermittent. My standard setting is with the volume control on the back of the RCF at about 3 o'clock and the output volume on the Helix at 10 o'clock. On stage that was plenty loud enough for us all to hear the bass once I'd angled the RCF at 45° across the stage. Out front for the headlining band that also used my rig, when the bass had been taken out of the PA (I don't know either) it was still audible although not as loud as I would have liked it. This was for a venue with a couple of hundred capacity, and had there been no PA support there was still plenty of volume available from the rig, although on stage hearing the other instruments on stage might have been a struggle at the required volumes to project FoH.

But unfortunately there isn't any direct and absolute correlation between cone size and frequency response as the trace that Bill posted shows. Yes, a manufacturer can design a range of drivers that will exhibit the characteristics that Chienmortbb's trace shows, but unless you know exactly which drivers are inside your cabs you are far more likely to get the sorts of results that Bill posted. @Al Krow stop trying to rely on misleading figures and just use your ears.

Other than pickup selection and coil section (for basses with more than one pickup or coil per pickup) I don't need any controls on my basses.

If you are going to get involved with MIDI program mapping is one of the most useful features available so long as your devices support it. Without program mapping, selecting program #1 on your controlling device sends MIDI program change message 1 to the receiving device(s) which in turn selects program #1. Selecting program #2 sends MIDI program change 2 and selects program #2 and so on. If you have program mapping, the program numbers on the controlling and receiving devices don't have to correspond which gives you a lot more flexibility. For starters you don't have to duplicate patches if you use the same sound more than once. You don't run into problems where the receiving and controlling devices have different numbers of programs, and therefore after a certain point the one device no longer has corresponding programs for the other. And if like me you like to have your patches on the controlling device in order of the set, you only have move them on the controlling device, the receiving device will still select the correct patch. HTH.

Which is why you really need program mapping. Does the Boss controller pedal allow you to do this?

IMO it completely defeats the object of not using Windows or Mac OS if you then have to run your plugins under emulation. You must require a special linux mindset to understand the Airwindows site. No matter how hard I looked i couldn't find any download links for the plugins. They certainly weren't on the products page, where I would expect them to be. And the list of plug in suppliers for linux in that last link is pitiful compared with what is available for Windows or Mac OS. If all I was going to do is surf the net and send some emails, or if I wanted to run a web or file server linux seems to be fine. However for actually doing anything creative linux just doesn't cut it.

Surely changing the number of coils attached to the output will change the impedance and therefore the sound?

Flavor Flav?

OK in that case you either need all identical cabs, or you need each different sized driver individually crossed over to prevent dispersion inconsistencies.

The monster tone only last weeks? I'd want longer than that.

Are the strings sufficiently far enough apart for there not to be cross-talk? And to be able to get individual coils in place?