Sadowsky MetroExpress - new line impressions

[ezbass]

15 minutes ago, CameronJ said:

 

 

 

That battery is an absolute fright! Not even making the small effort to secure the trim pots is very poor indeed.

Edited November 27, 2020 by ezbass

[CameronJ]

8 minutes ago, ezbass said:

That battery is an absolute fright! Not even making the small effort to secure the trim pots is very poor indeed.

That’s the thing - most of this stuff costs little to no money to fix. It just smacks of complete negligence.

Edited November 27, 2020 by CameronJ

[Russ]

The biggest competition for these basses is the likes of Sire (who are also burdened with the issue of an ugly headstock), so I'd imagine that's what Roger has benchmarked these against. 

He's not exactly going out of his way to promote them though. There is not a single mention of them on sadowsky.com and there seems to be very little talk about them elsewhere - there's no hype, basically. The Sire stuff was very well hyped before it came out, and were sold out and backordered from day 1 due to their popularity. 

 

[CookPassBabtridge]

11 hours ago, CameronJ said:

Granted, Sandbergs and Dingwall Combustions/NGs are sent back to their German/Canadian shops for final setup and inspection. One would think Roger Sadowsky might go down the same route considering how synonymous his brand is with quality.

That would be the most logical thing to do, but it would likely push the production costs up too close to the Japanese/German Metros. There are some other things Roger could do to improve standards (like you mentioned), though that may take a while to ‘bed in’ at the factories. Which makes you wonder about the standard of those already on sale - Thomann, GuitarGuitar et al already have a load in stock. 

[CameronJ]

3 hours ago, CookPassBabtridge said:

That would be the most logical thing to do, but it would likely push the production costs up too close to the Japanese/German Metros. There are some other things Roger could do to improve standards (like you mentioned), though that may take a while to ‘bed in’ at the factories. Which makes you wonder about the standard of those already on sale - Thomann, GuitarGuitar et al already have a load in stock. 

Exactly this. Personally I wouldn’t mind paying a bit extra for an import Sadowsky that I knew had been set up & checked by Roger & his techs in NYC.

Edited November 28, 2020 by CameronJ

[Nebadon2000]

If you want a Sadowsky Bass get one with a headstock that looks like this; 

There are 5 B Stocks of Metroexpress on Reverb already.

Edited November 28, 2020 by Nebadon2000
added content

[LukeFRC]

7 hours ago, Nebadon2000 said:

If you want a Sadowsky Bass get one with a headstock that looks like this; 

There are 5 B Stocks of Metroexpress on Reverb already.

Or even an older Japanese metro

[OliverBlackman]

On 25/11/2020 at 22:51, CookPassBabtridge said:

The overall tone is actually pretty nice. Biggest concern is those noisy electronics - hopefully that was an isolated QC issue but who knows! 

Having criticised the Sadowsky sound previously and found it completely underwhelming on Metros and USA models, I actually really liked the passive tone on this. Although is it a big step up from a Sire V7? Doesn’t appear to be. 

[ped]

53 minutes ago, LukeFRC said:

Or even an older Japanese metro

Or an AtelierZ 🤗

[LukeFRC]

2 hours ago, ped said:

Or an AtelierZ 🤗

Or a ... there’s some really cracking Japanese makers aren’t there? Ild love a navigator 

[Alph]

The bad example of Fender

[Musicman20]

What an absolute mess of a launch. 

[thodrik]

2 hours ago, Musicman20 said:

What an absolute mess of a launch. 

I would almost say that the launch has had 'Gibson-esque' qualities. All we need is some automatic tuners and a 'RSD - Play Authentic' social media campaign complete with some lawsuit threats. 

Seriously though, I feel that Warwick are not taking any real ownership over QC issues. It has been left to Roger Sadowsky to try and sort out the QC issues and I have no doubts that he will do his best to do that given his general background in having strict standards of quality control. Realistically though that should be Warwick's job as part of the licensing agreement, which was theoretically signed to give Roger Sadowsky more time to dedicate to building instruments in his NYC shop and not sorting out QC issues in Warwick's factory. 

2020 has been a crap year for launching products, but even with that in mind this launch has been pretty disappointing. 

[White Cloud]

I can't see how any of this will do anything other than diminish the Sadowsky brand.

Watering your products down not one but two notches seems to me like business suicide. 

[OliverBlackman]

45 minutes ago, White Cloud said:

I can't see how any of this will do anything other than diminish the Sadowsky brand.

Watering your products down not one but two notches seems to me like business suicide. 

I don’t think it will adversely affect the NY stuff. It already has such a solid reputation amongst players. Same way the KSD stuff hasn’t affected Ken Smith basses. 

If they get it right eventually it will be another income stream. 
 

[afterimage]

There  shouldn't really be quality control issues like this  

[CameronJ]

Especially not when it’s a partnership between two incredibly well know brands such as Sadowsky and Warwick!

[chris_b]

1 hour ago, afterimage said:

There  shouldn't really be quality control issues like this  

You are right, but at the start of new product lines there are always teething problems. I think we are only talking about one bass. If so, that's not the end of the world. How the issues are managed and resolved that will affect the reputation of these Sadowsky basses, not one bass with a problem.

[ianrendall]

On 27/11/2020 at 14:06, CameronJ said:

Reading my posts back it potentially looks like I have an axe to grind with Sadowsky - I really don’t. I haven’t ever owned one of their basses but definitely would in future, most likely a Japanese MetroExpress! It just seems like they’ve seriously missed the ball here. Granted, COVID hasn’t made things easy for anyone but one would think that would be all the more reason to be meticulous before releasing a new product to market.

In Roger Sadowsky’s partial defence, he’s been active on Talkbass and seems to be taking measures to adjust and improve these basses. For example, below is a photo of the control cavity, taken by LowEndLobster:

Bit of a bird’s nest. One of the components appears to not even be fastened down (3M adhesive on the back) and look at that battery. but Roger has implemented some changes already so the cavities will now look more like this going forward:

 

Much neater. And the battery doesn’t look quite as crusty as before.

Also, the Vintage Tone Control unit will soon be available separately as an upgrade part, along with a humcancelling J pickup. Nice that these will become available but the VTC should have been a standard feature in my opinion, especially on a bass with a boost only preamp! Seem a bit mental not to have any means of rolling off treble whatsoever as standard - a tone control costs bloody pennies!

This way, people will have to spend additional money on upgrade parts, plus they’ll have to find their own luthier to do the installation. A sub-£1k bass can tip over the £1k Mark at the end of all this.

Can anyone tell I won’t be buying one of these??

That is shocking. The second pic is much better. I took a pic of the innards of my NYC for comparison. 

[CameronJ]

@ianrendall that cavity is a beautiful sight to behold!

[ltgobis]

I just received my new Metro Express 5 string jazz bass. I have the same horrible noise problems as everyone noticed. Being an electronics geek I had to look in to the problem and stared poking around inside the electronics compartment. I noticed that if I touched the blue or green wire going from the treble control to the input of the preamp the noise would increase. It looked like the problem was at the input of the preamp. I went to my electronics parts bin and found a .01uf bypass capacitor. The type used in most circuits to suppress (bypass) RF signals to ground. I placed it between the blue wire (lug) and ground (lug) on the bass control. Amazingly this fixed the problem and now I have a very quite Metro Express. One thing that is notable. Sadowsky already has a bypass capacitor between the blue wire and ground. So adding my capacitor placed it in parallel to the stock one. The fact that adding my capacitor fixed the problem tells me that either the stock capacitor was defective or it was not large enough to suppress the noise. Also, adding only .01uf on the treble control will not roll off audio frequencies.

Edited December 29, 2020 by ltgobis
accuracy

[CameronJ]

Nice work, @ltgobis. Though I suspect the average person wouldn’t have the parts or knowledge to perform that fix themselves. I certainly wouldn’t!

[AndyTravis]

On 05/12/2020 at 10:44, ianrendall said:

That is shocking. The second pic is much better. I took a pic of the innards of my NYC for comparison. 

My Japan Metroline is the same as this.

[CookPassBabtridge]

Sorry to hear you’ve had this hassle @ltgobis Sadly, it looks as if the hum in the vid posted earlier wasn’t an isolated problem/a grounding issue then. This could be a ‘teething issue’ with the first batch and be fixed soon but even so it raises concerns regarding QC. 

[chris_b]

14 hours ago, CameronJ said:

. . . . . .  I suspect the average person wouldn’t have the parts or knowledge to perform that fix themselves.

. . . . but we shouldn't have to. You'd have expected Warwick to have fixed this issue (now seen in the UK and US) in the testing phase!! Sadowsky quality control was legendary. Maybe these could be called teething problems, but how did Warwick let basses with such problems "escape".