Steinberger

> Has anyone here ever retrofitted an L2 with an after market pre-amp (like

an Aguilar

> OBP-1 or OBP-3)? Is there enough room in the cavity under the face plate?

> Obviously, I'd want to keep the option of putting everything back the way

I found

> it. And before the accusations of heresy start flying: I do have specific

reasons for

> wanting to consider this.

>

> Also, (and I'm sure this question has been asked here before) Who makes

the best

> double ball bass string? I'm aware opinions and tastes vary, but I just

thought I'd

> put it out there...

>

There's a lot of room inside an L or XL bass.  The instrument body is

somewhat like a shell and there's quite a lot of space inside (my bro has

mentioned it sort of like a TV dinner tray). 

The Aguilar OBP-1 might pose a few problems though.  The original one has

about the largest plastic box housing the EQ circuit of any active

electronics set out there (much larger than a 9V battery) and it wants to

have an 18V power supply, so you have two problems - fitting the box and

finding a good location for the second battery.  It's not going to be easy

to fit a second battery with access from the outside.  We had a group member

who had an electronics problem that turned out to be an 18V mod where the

second battery was secretly hidden in the battery under the face plate, so

you have to decide whether you want your regular maintenance to include

pulling the faceplate. 

It looks like the current OBP-1 and OBP-3 is in a much smaller box.  The

OBP-3 can work on 18V, but will work on 9 as well.  The OBP-3 has midrange,

so you'll need to do something to create enough holes for all the control

pots.  You would need a minimum of two holes for the EQ controls plus volume

controls, so I guess you could stay with existing three holes if you put

pickup volumes on a stack pot, then stacked bass/treble, and a mid pot. If

you don’t care about the mid control, then an OBP-2 might be an easier fit.

Same box, 9V operation and bass and treble on a stack pot in the same hole

that the passive tone knob is in now.  I've never heard of that model until

I went to the Aguilar site to find box dimensions.

OK, there's one other caveat for many of the active EQ circuits out there.

The pickups on your bass will either be EMG-SS or EMG-HB which are both

active pickups with internal preamps.  These are low impedance with a

relatively high output level.  Most EQ circuits are expecting the output

from a passive pickup, so you should check with the manufacturer to make

sure that this will be OK (specifically, to make sure that you're not

overdriving the input of the EQ). 

EMG makes an onboard EQ that does work with their active pickups and sounds

pretty good too - the EMG-BT control.  This would also give you bass and

treble on a stack pot.  The EQ board on the EMG system is physically

attached to the pot, so you should check to make sure that there's room for

that as well, but I don’t think it should be a problem.  The treble

frequency on the EMG system is switchable with a little DIP switch on the

board, which is nice too.

David Fung

Check out this Modified XL2

maybe i'm weird, but i always tried to modify my other non-berger basses to sound like an XL2!

Not weird at all Chris!  ...but what can you say, after a while anything can get old

Might want to take a look and what coming down the pike:

Steinberger XT series DB tuner modified Bass guitars introduced by GuitarSend.

That doesnt sound crazy at all!  But perhaps I should be more clear.  By "modifying" we mean enhancing.  The EMG standard pickups are replaced by modern more capeable EMG's... Same sound plus a whole lot more capability!