Actually our friend Mario is an accomplished, working professional musician in South America. Not a lot of bedroom players pack spare batteries, strings, and amp fuses.
Hey, if you like this mod, great. Most of us with a few miles under our belts gig-wise obviously prefer Alembic's low impedance pickups and have made peace with living with 9 volts or the offboard power supply. Most of us also own passive basses. And most of us have had the occasional power outage on a gig, which is why most of us, like Mario, keep a spare handy. Generally you can hear the tone, headroom, etc., going South before it goes silent, but occasionally not.
This is generally a pretty 'flameless' chat room, so I would think about just who you may or may not know when you continue the dialog.
I'd imagine over the years, ALEMBIC has done lots of mods not generally kept in their standard features. And Ron's original idea was to lower the number of turns in the coils to better the frequency response of the pickups vs. what was available in the late 60's.
The onboard preamp/low impedance pickup concept he refined and incorporated into the axes was the forerunner of EMG, Bartollini, and so on. But there's lots of great passive pickups as well, and if it's handy for you to have the facility to switch back and forth, great.
But believe me, a lot of us have been playing a long time . . . and have worked hard to know what we're talking about.
