Model Year: 2000
Price: $630.00 (new)
Where Obtained: Ebay

This bass is made of a super-secret material that Ibanez calls "luthite". It's basically some sort of space-age plastic, like fiberglass or acrylic. It's pretty solid and sturdy, as if it was made out of a medium-heavy wood. The only part of it actually made of wood is the fretboard. It has active electronics and a multi-band equalizer that lets you do a lot to shape the tone. The body is a grey/charcoal color. 24 frets. It looks rather heavy metal in appearance, though the lines to it are a bit more rounded. The ergonomic feel to it is quite nice and makes long playing sessions more tolerable.

It's pretty smooth, like butter almost. It took me a while to get it adjusted to the action how I wanted, but it's pretty sleek and swift. Not absolutely perfect, but really good. The only improvement I could see would be for it to have a graphite neck.

Great sound quality, easy to make it warm, full, dark, thin, trebly, rumbly, or anything in-between. I use it for funk, jazz, metal, rock, and progressive and it holds its own just about anywhere. Maybe a little lacking in the funk district. Plays well through a Hartke 2115 amp, and also sounds good enough to run directly to the mixer. It's equally useful both on stage and in the studio, and one of the more versatile and best-sounding 5-strings you can get for under $1K.

I clobbered the HECK out of this thing for three years. It finally needed to have the volume pot cleaned and the grounds resoldered. With how badly I treated this thing I'm impressed that's all it needed in three years. A bit of tweaking in the local repair shop and it was just as good as new.

Model Year: 2001
Price: $875.00 (new)
Where Obtained: Jimenez Musical instruments

Like other "ED" (Ergodyne models) luthite body is comfortable and offers a high resonant. Passive pickups an nactive Eq's works fine.

Very comfortable and easy to play in a 5 string bass.

Marvelous sound for this price

No comments in this field, i bought it two weeks ago :)

Price: $0.00 (new)
Where Obtained: guitar trader

This 5-string has a dual soap bar active pick-up set-up with one panner and each pick-up has a trebel and bass cut/boost nob. It has an interesting body desigen if you've never seen an ergodyne bass. The back side is shaped to fit your body and it has a nice cut out on the front for slap. It also has a 24 fret rosewood fingerboard with a maple neck that you can't see under the luthite body (some plastic/epoxy) that makes up the rest of the bass body.

Plays pretty well not much to say here

You can get a great range of tone with the pick-ups. You can't believe the growl that can be acheived by turning up all the controlls (basically mid scoop) and doing some slap. It's almost too much at times just have to turn some of it down at times.