Owen

[quote name='warwickhunt' post='267079' date='Aug 21 2008, 02:14 PM']A Demeter pre has always been top of my 'to try' list, much jealous of your bit of kit Do you have to fiddle with the EQ much and do you find the parametric useful?[/quote] Not really having to mess with the EQ much, a touch of Bass warms things up nicely but the main EQ is more like adding texture than scalpel like precision The parametric is very useful to get rid of the resonant Bb/B on my double bass though. I have ditched 2 other preamps since having my marathon try out and there is another to go.

1 U pre-amp. Valve goodness. 3 band passive EQ + 2 bands full parametric. FX loop with front mounted send and return. Mute switch. I dread to think how many amps I have run over the years. Edited high (or low) lights are Petersen, Trace, Ampeg, Boogie, EA, AI, Focusrite, Fishman, BDDI, GK, Hartke, Peavey, EBS, ummmmm. I'm just putting those up as a point of reference that I have heard and used different pre-amps in my time. The Demeter is fabulous. I plugged several bass guitars in and they all sounded good. no need for excessive EQing, they just worked. Did it colour the sound - Mmmm yes. In a good way. No harshness, or EQ extremes, just solid usable tone. Good headroom and control. The next test was a Double Bass with a Fishman full circle pick-up. Piezo pick ups are notoriously fussy about their first input in the amplification chain, they need a really high impedance. I have been using a Fishman Pro platinum Bass EQ for a long time now as the beginning of my signal chain. It was the best I'd found and is choc full of useful DB stuff. However, into my Berg IP112 there was an element of harshness which was getting on my nerves. I plugged into the Demeter passive input, not really expecting great things. I was wrong. It is smooth smooth smooth. Full range without any of that upper mid "boink" which really gets on my nerves. I know I should be writing things about "tone like butter" and "grind when driven" etc but the bottom line is that everything that I have plugged has sounded a lot better than they have sounded into anything else . I almost got carried away and just played, being able to forget about my signal chain. Imagine that!

This might be obvious to all apart from me, but when I tried it first I forgot to do anything with the nut and it sounded like you say yours does.

I've owned 2. The 5 HH was immense. I will own another one day. The 5H/S with piezo was deeply underwhelming in comparison. The piezo was my first piezo thing. It was not good at all. I then got a Bolin with piezo. Just fabulous. So to sum up (for me) 5HH = fab. 5H/S piezo = not the fire breathing dragon I was hoping for. YMMV obv.

Amp. If you cannot (or get someone to) set up the action and intonate your bass then is not cheap, it is firewood. If you got a 2nd hand £60 cheapie P, set it up and dumped a second hand (£30 seems to be the going rate) SD quarter pounder into it then you are good to go. If you want a J or a 5 or 6 then you will be paying a bit more, but you get the idea. Tone REALLY comes from a decent power section in your amp. A nice pre-amp is nice, but with a weak power section it is useless. Even not-as-good speakers sound better with a decent power section. Of course we could all (and some of us have) spend £silly on basses, but a well set up cheapie through a decent rig will do the job fine and dandy.