Yamaha TRB-1005 or Ibanez BTB675?

[liko]

Lately I've been struck by the impulse to trade in my Yamaha TRB-1005 for an Ibanez BTB, probably the 675. There's a nice one in zebrawood on clearance at the local GC, pretty sure I can make it an even trade.

Thoughts on the Yammie:

+ Hell of a player; very comfortable neck and body size.

+ Tight B-string, better than 90\% of the fivers I've tried.

+ Wide tonal palette and very easy to get a good tone from; the 3-band EQ is positioned nicely to tweak the right areas of the bass's tone.

+ Quilt top with a layer of blue-stained wood in a slightly offset body gives a distinctive yet relatively subtle visual profile.

+ Mine's an MIK, but they don't make them like this for the US market anymore, and the MIJs are $1200+ on the 'Bay.

- Natural tone with pickups balanced and EQ flat is a bit on the bright and brassy side; well-suited for fusion and modern jazz, not a vintage jazz or rock tone by any stretch, through a treble cut gets you in the neighborhood.

- Electronics have a lot of buzz in them when soloing a pickup. Many possible causes; some diagrams show the two coils in the 5-string pickup as being unequal in size, while others say it's the trimpot that varies the dummy coil's output; still others say it's inherent in the preamp design. In any case, rolling away from center on the blend pot brings in buzz.

- Bolt-on neck makes the extreme upper frets a little harder to get to. I rarely spend much time up there though.

Thoughts on the BTB:

+ Pretty tight B, seems a little looser than the Yammie but that could be a difference in strings.

+ Decent neck, a little thin but not the floppy diving board of the Soundgear series.

+ Switchable mid center frequency, either 250 or 600Hz.

+ Available in a wide variety of wood tops for a more personal look; I'm liking the zebrawood.

+ Whisper quiet in the store at all pickup blend positions. Course, the store isn't my man cave.

+ Accessibility second to none; neck-through construction and cutaways all the way up to the 24th fret on both sides means no problem getting anywhere on the fretboard (though as stated I spend most of my time in the lower octave).

+ Bartolini pickups. Gotta love em. Coupled with whatever preamp's in these things it was easy to go from a nice deep fingerstyle groove to jazz burp to in-your-face slap.

+ Flush-mount Neutrik locking jack. My Yammie has a recessed jack that doesn't take kindly to right-angle plugs, and having a plug work lose on an active is a very bad thing.

- Kind of an unknown; my brother owns a BTB 5-string and I was jealous of it when he bought it, but not enough to trade in my own at the time.

- Very out-there body style, with the long top horn required to balance the very short body.

- Ibanez. Everyone's got one, nobody's real proud of it.

If I keep what I have, I have to do *something* about that buzz. I might short the red and white pickup wires so both coils get exactly the same treatment by the downstream electronics, or I might go so far as to swap out the board for an Aguilar OBP3 kit.

 

Obligatory stock pics so you can make a superficial decision:

Yamaha TRB-1005, Natural Finish: :

Ibanez BTB-675ZW: