Nordstrand Audio 2B Unwired Preamp

Nordstrand 2B Unwired Preamp

Plenty of boutique basses leave the workshop with a Nordstrand preamp inside, and there’s a reason builders keep choosing it. The 2B is Carey Nordstrand’s own 2-band design, built in Redlands, California. It does bass and treble and nothing else, and it does them musically, without the harsh, hyped edge that gives some active circuits a bad name.

This is the unwired version: the 2B module and its two EQ pots, with no pre-built harness. That’s the one to pick when your bass has its own control layout, when you’re a builder fitting your own wiring, or when you just want to decide for yourself how volume, blend and bypass get hooked up.

EQ, Gain & Installation

The bass control works at 50 Hz with +/- 12 dB. That’s low enough to add weight and depth under the note without muddying the low mids where your definition lives, and cutting there tightens things up quickly on a boomy bass or in a boomy room. Treble sits at 4 kHz with the same +/- 12 dB range, which covers string clarity, finger attack and slap zing. A small DIP switch on the board moves the treble point up to 5.3 kHz, so the boost lands higher, adding air and sparkle rather than bite. That’s a great option if your pickups are already bright in the upper mids.

A trim pot on the circuit board sets overall gain from 0 to +15 dB. You set it once to match the preamp’s output to your pickups, or to keep the jump between active and passive level if you wire in a bypass. On 9V, Nordstrand quotes around 250 hours from an alkaline battery. Add a second battery for 18V and you get more headroom for hard players and big EQ boosts, plus longer battery life.

The unwired 2B is for anyone who knows how they want their controls laid out: a luthier doing an OEM install, a player replacing a tired stock preamp, or a tech who wants a stacked or custom setup. Nordstrand also makes prewired versions of the 2B, but the circuit is the same one the high-end builders fit.