Help - Ibanez EQB3 active eq went boom

[lateralus462]

Well not quite boom but...............

At band practice this evening I started having some problems with my gear. At first I though I had a blown speaker but I tried another bass that was lying around at the amp is working fine, so I went to check the battery in my bass - when I removed the cover I noticed that the battery was hot, like so hot it was uncomfortable to hold and the back of the guitar smelt like someone had been soldering, so I took the control cavity cover off. The active EQ looks exremely scorched around where the power connects to the board, so I'm guessing the unit is fried (when I hook a new battery up all I get is extremely faint and extremely distorted sound)

The fact that I need a new EQ is a bit of a no brainer, but I have a couple of problems with this - The first is that the bass is just outside the one year guarantee I had on it, so I'm gonna have to pay to get it fixed (which is a problem because I have serious cashflow issues at the moment) so the second problem I have is how to fix it. Do I try and source another Ibanez EQ the same, or do I replace it with another pre and if so which one and how much is it likely to cost?

My next thought is what's caused the problem in the first place - if it was a problem with the EQ itself, then fair enough I can get a new one, but could it have been caused by something else, ie dodgy battery/wiring and if so could the same thing happen after I install the new EQ?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I need to sort this out as quickly as possible - this is my only bass and I have a load of rehearsals and some recording coming up over the next week or so.

Cheers

Chris

Edited June 2, 2008 by lateralus462

[King Tut]

Although I'm not familiar with your bass, your cheapest option (assuming the pups are passive) would be to wire the bass up passive in the short term - until you have enough dough to put an active eq in.

Assuming it's a 2 pickup bass - you'll need 3 pots, some wire, some solder and a capacitor. Do a quick search for wiring diagrams, or find a mate who can do it for you. You never know - you might even think it sounds better passive.

If you don't like it passive, once you've got enough money you need to decide whether to replace the original eq, or upgrade - I guess most of us would upgrade - so look at EMG, John East, bartolini, Aguilar etc.

If you have some front, you might take your bass back to the shop and ask them to fix it - they probably have a luthier they regularly use - insist on cost price as it's only just out of warranty, and insist they lend you a bass (prob second hand) to use while yours is away. be polite but firm - they want your continued custom........but maybe you bought it online or from Sound Control?

Just some options for you dude! Hope it helps.

[lateralus462]

I hadn't thought about wiring it up passive - it's a thought but I do use the 3 band eq a lot when I'm playing and I don't know whether I'd want to lose that level of control over my sound.

[lateralus462]

I've just spoken to GAK to try and source a replacement and apparently it's going to cost 60 quid.

Looking around at some different sites on the web it looks like I should be able to get a half decent aftermarket preamp for not much more - for example [url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/seymour_duncan_stc3p.htm"]http://www.thomann.de/gb/seymour_duncan_stc3p.htm[/url]

Any one used one of these and are they any good? I would imagine they are better than the stock Ibanez pre and I like the idea of the "slap contour"