By popular demand, here updated pictures and my opinions of the VB4!
The bottom line: I LOVE this bass. I can not imagine I will ever give this bass up for sale, unless I am absolutely destitute, or my brain undergoes some radical transformation and I no longer care for the jazz bass tone.
Let's talk cons, to get those out of the way. They all come back to the compromises required to make the headless system work.
1) My fingers hurt from tuning this thing. Some real finger strength is needed to turn these tuners. This is especially true of the D string tuner, for whatever reason.
2) It is difficult to get the ball of each string into the tuner claw.It was tough to get the balls of the previous strings out, and I had to use a tool to get the balls of the new strings to fully sit in the claw.
3) I am hesitant to put the following as a con because it wasn't a problem, but I could see how it could be because I took a guess and happened to get lucky. Further, by comparison, the headless design of the Steinbergers does not have this problem, so here goes: there is a certain window in which the string length must be cut. If you cut it too long, you can easily bury the tuners without getting the string up to pitch. If you cut too short, you can't screw down the end of the string and still get the ball into the tuner claw at the bridge. In this case, the string is wasted. This is in contrast to the Steinberger design where you can put the ball in the claw, then feed the entire string trough the adapter, pull it tight and clamp down, thereby giving the string the proper length. With this Zon, there is nowhere for the excess length to feed through, so it must be cut before clamping down. I took a guess and decided to cut the string at the end of the "headstock," such as it is. This turned out to work just fine.
Now let's get to the pros! The good stuff! Yeah!:
1) This thing sounds awesome. It sounds like a jazz bass. Of course, I wish it had more of the bullfrog sound, but I can never get enough of the bullfrog sound. No bass has ever given me more bullfrog than I like. But, this bass has has plenty of it. The small body does not have any negative effect on its low-end that I can tell.
2) It plays great. The neck is smooth. The edges feel great, It feels solid.
3) It is very well balanced. Thanks, Ned!
4) It is lightweight and comfortable.
I have been feening for a(nother) jazz bass for a while, and having one of this quality that is lightweight and portable with the stability and durability of a carbon-composite neck is just about everything that I could ask for in a bass. Not only that, I have redeemed my mistake of a few years ago. For years, I have been subscribing to eBay alerts for "Zon Sonus", as well as my Reverb feed. And I waited, patiently. I knew it would take time. And now, the time has come!
In the Southpaw Spotted thread, there was some questions about pot rotation. Well, here is something odd: the pots are all left-handed, except the pickup blend pot. Also, in the EQ section, the treble knob is closes to the bridge, with the bass knob closes to the neck. I would guess this is so Zon didn't have to make a different preamp board for the left-handed models. I can't remember if my G&L is like this or not.
There was earlier discussion about the pickups being "left-handed" pickups and and pot rotation. The only thing I can imagine a left-handed pickup being is having the wire leads come out the other side of the pickup so that they are closer to the routing hole. Having to route the pickup wires back across the pickup has been a problem for me, before. That is just an idea. I don't want to take the thing apart to find out.
Pictures!
Whole bass:
Body:
It has a nice, natural satin finish. My previous Zon had a gloss finish. I like the satin, better.
Neck, all nice and clean. There is no truss rod, so there aren't any relief adjustments. For good or ill, it is what it is.
All of the other carbon/composite instruments I have had all have a nice smooth fretboard. This fretboard has some grain to it, which made me think for a minute that the fretboard might be wood, but I don't think it is wood. It is extremely dark, and I can't find any line of demarcation where the the fretboard is a separate piece from the neck.
Headstock:
