Anyone here know anything about *gulp* bass?

@jay mitchell is right, the “active” part of any active pickup is the preamp itself. The pickups are just standard passive electromagnetic pickups.

Pickups like EMG just have the active preamp housed inside the pickup itself, whereas many/most “active” basses have the preamp outside the pickup housing
 
jay mitchell said:
FYI, "active" pickups are, without exception, passive pickups with a preamp inside the cover. IOW, the only difference in your comparison above is the location of the preamp.
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well regardless of how you define it, there's a clear difference when you're buying EMG/fishman vs a standard pass pup bass with an active preamp. Also, "active" pickups on bass tend to reproduce a much wider spectrum where standard passive + external preamp has rolled highs and lows. My dingwall and other passives have a fundamentally different tone than my spector and emg jazz, for example - preamp settings notwithstanding. They really aren't the same thing from a marketing standpoint or a tonal standpoint even if they "do" the same thing functionally.

I mean, the EMG HZ series is a good example. They're pretty much designed to be the active pickups without an integrated preamp, and they are very audibly more "passive" sounding even when a preamp is added.
 
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Anyway, not to start a pickup debate - the point was that it's a common point of confusion for guitarists with bass because most are used to thinking of active as meaning EMG or fishman or blackouts but with bass terminology that's very often than not the case. Many 'active' basses are just straight up normal commercial passive pickups with preamps added after the fact.
 
northern_fox said:
there's a clear difference when you're buying EMG/fishman vs a standard pass pup bass with an active preamp.
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Of course. I didn't say otherwise. For example, EMG pickups won't sound like P or J stock pickups. They're still passive magnetic pickups with preamps in the pickup cover, however. They would sound no different if EMG chose to provide the preamp in a separate housing from the pickup.
 
Passive pickups use a great many turns on the winding to generate sufficient output level. The more turns, the more peaky the frequency response. An active pickup can get huge amounts of gain from its preamp so it can use a much smaller coil - which is analogous to an aerial in a radio receiver. The smaller coil will typically have a flatter response and the low impedance output of the active preamps in active p/us like EMGs etc can drives lines without the RFI noise and the loss of higher frequencies. These lend themselves to direct recording without a DI - straight into the desk or audio interface.
 
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