Never understood that preamp thing, on or off board
This I can believe
never done it.
This I do not believe. Because...
On any bass amp I generally dial in bass full or a little less, mids about half, treble 3/4.
Those are the control knobs of your pre-amp. All amplifier systems have preamps or they woulda make a no sound. Even if they have no EQ at all they need to have a premp
You are using that preamp to alter your tone, Pretty drastically too I might add. I've no experience with SVTs or Oranges but the Mark Bass has an active preamp. That means that all the tone knobs straight up are doing nothing. Turn the bass knob to the left and you reduce the volume of the lower frequencies. Turn the bass knob to the right and you get more volume to the lower frequencies.
Then there are passive preamps. I am most familiar with the Alembic F1X which has a passive Bandaxall tone stack like many a guitar amp (I believe it is basically the pre-amp of a Fender Showman). It has bass, middle and treble controls that are really more like filters. When you boost the bass, you're really filtering off some of the mids & highs so that the bass notes get relatively louder.
Active or passive the end result is more or less the same. It's all about the relative boosting/cutting certain frequencies. On an active pre, you can get a similar result in different ways: for example: Boost the bass & treble, leave the mids flat - or - leave the bass and treble flat and cut the mids. In the second option you have to also boost the volume off course. Both ways are going to give you a basic "scoop"/smiley face EQ setting. That's more or less what you're doing with your "bass full or a little less, mids about half, treble 3/4."
Personally, I prefer the active method. It's more intuitive but it usually has more unnecessarily drastic capabilities. I can't believe that people can play a Stingray live with the bass & treble maxed. I loved the F1X but it was hard to get a decent sound in a crappy sounding room.
Meanwhile, your passive bass with a single tone knob is again a kind of filter. The "pure" sound of the pick-up is with the tone maxed out to the trebley side of things. Turn it down and you're cutting some upper frequencies.
I like active basses for playing live. I can potentially fix an acoustically crappy room a little easier because I can at least hear my EQ changes at the end of my patch cord. I also like saturating the input into the amp,sorta poor man's compression like an old toob amp. But I think I play with a relatively light touch too.
Basses are not guitars. Guitars don't have some of our issues sound wise. Your basic 4 string is of course one octave lower than a guitar and those low frequencies are hard to control and can easily get out of hand in a live setting. I think an active bass gives you some more control of the situation.
A lot of "good bass sound" in a live setting involves not reproducing the lowest frequencies that a bass guitar makes. You don't really want to hear the lowest fundamental too much because it will turn into pure mud in all but the best of rooms. Active pre-amps in the bass or out of it let you more precisely remove some of what you have too much off in a particular situation.
As an interesting aside, the bottom octave of a Hammond organ does not have a fundamental at all. What you hear/perceive as the low part of those notes is the first harmonic and a fifth. An old organ trick is to play a low note with the fifth that is perceived lower than the fundamental. Hammond organs are even more of an abomination against god & nature than electric guitars.
