I completely agree.
I just got my z7 and gigged with it this past weekend.
The neck is fantastic, the pickups sound great, the controls are useful sonically, the stainless steel frets are a nice touch, string through body, contoured neck heel is lovely, and it looks great (I don’t mind the Sire headstock).
That being said, what the others have said about the knobs is unfortunately true; they’re crap.
They all feel different. The indents are hard to find. The stacked knobs stick together badly, so it’s difficult to control them individually. Frankly, I don’t need the selectable Q on the mid knob and wish it were just at a set point (like the z3 or a stock MM). They feel cheap in your hand too.
Like I said earlier, they work great as far as getting the sound you want but it’s sometimes a pain to use them.
The knobs on my real MM are rock solid, smooth and the indents settle in nicely. It’s the one thing Sire really misses on with this bass.
A word about the single coil. There is a significant output difference. As a studio tool this wouldn’t be an issue. As a live instrument I found myself unable to use the neck pickup by itself, even when that’s the tone I wanted because it was such a drastic reduction in signal/volume to FoH. That humbucker is phenomenal though and blending in a little of the neck here and there worked ok.
Another poster said the bass knob doesn’t do much. Not in my experience.
If I rolled that bass knob up I blew the rest of my band off the stage with the low end - massively powerful.
Now my problem is that I don’t know if the stainless steel frets make this bass worth keeping or if I should get the z3 instead, with the hopes that nonstacked knobs on the z3 would be superior. It would also remove my frustration with the single coil. Every time I play it, I’m going to wish that neck single coil was a viable option, but it’s just not, so I’d almost rather it wasn’t there.
