Well for the exact reason you first stated, I did start on headphones, then moved to practice amp, then today I pulled my typical gig rig and really demoed it out. I also saw on another post that I will link here that going out of send 1 or 2 instead of Outputs 1 or 2 will bypass the QC preamp.
It for sure drastically altered the tone so I feel like that’s working and now I’ve built an entire preset from scratch (overwriting the old one before seeing your response so sorry I can’t provide that) and I do feel like I’m getting somewhere now. There is definitely still a coloration that is happening even on a blank slate preset that I’m not sure I’m in love with, but I just got the thing so I’m pretty sure with enough tweaking with EQ, compression etc I can get what I’m looking for.
Not to dismiss my own post, I guess I’m still wondering if people find their bass tone kinda hollow sounding out of the box and need to do a lot of compensating or if there’s something I’m missing. Also checked another post and tried altering the impedence but I couldn’t really hear a major difference in respect to what I was concerned with about the tone. Any additional suggestions would be great though!