Lately it seems my stingray sub 5 seems to be going into overdrive when playing loudll notes through my Rumble 40. I have the volume on the guitar on full the amp gain and volume are at like 10% but it seems to be distorting.
(The overdrive on the amp is turned off)
I haven’t tried my other guitar on it lately but I’m wondering if the Stingray is just too strong of a signal or maybe the battery is starting to go.
I’m going to run some tests this weekend but if anyone has thoughts I’m open.
My thoughts are turn down the signal from the bass and turn up the amp.
That’ll give you some informative data.
It’s definitely hotter than the standard Stingray since all but one Sterling are wired in series instead of parallel.
I definitely agree with @Barney, you need to drop the signal level.
Piggybacking on that question: but in general it is better to have the highest output from the (passive) bass, providing you set the gain at the amp/audio interface in a way it does not distort (shows red levels), right?
In my case I always set the volume on my bass on max … and optimize the gain on the audio interface. The logic behind it is that I expect best “quality” if the “signal” from the bass is strongest!!!
There actually are minor tonal changes on passive instruments as you roll off the volume but on bass it’s basically not an issue. Much more important to prevent overdriving the inputs.
With guitar, depending on the pot values it could be noticeable as the treble slightly decreases, but with bass it is much less a factor, and is neither bad or good, it just is an effect.
For active instruments (either preamp or active pickups) there should be no effect.
So, there are no issues like signal to noise etc?
Nope - the noise level from the pickups will decrease proportionally with the signal. Of course if you have other noise between the bass and interface there may be a S/N change.
The effect is caused by the fact that as the volume goes down, the resistance across the pickup goes up. The pickup is a coil and has some residual fundamental inductance; this causes it and the volume pot to form an additional resistor/inductor filter on top of the resistor/capacitor filter in the tone control, and so changing the resistance alters the cutoff frequency of the minor filtering effect caused by the pickup/pot circuit.
Ah, cool to know - great explanation!
For convenience reasons I’ll stick with the max volume on the bass and set gain at audio interface though. I prefer to set it once and forget about it!
If the bass volume knobs had some kind of 50% center click indication, it would be different…
Yeah if you’re not having a problem no reason to attenuate the volume.
And for the active stingray the treble bleed effect should not exist at all (the volume knob in that case is doing something to an entirely different circuit). There should not be a tonal change.
Hmmm! well I don’t do Overdrive pedals so lucky me. 
Muscle memory puts me at never max out my bass volume. My personal max level is at 75%-ish. You’ll never know what you may need when your send your signal to the engineer and in a pinch if I need to hear more I have a bit of instant control.
My experience told me that the crack limit comes from the gain and not the volume naturally. I’d assume that with the pedal it just makes the job easier to control but I’m adopting @howard explanation as my understanding of the subject now, 
The pickups on my Jazz bass are hot. When I want to play clean, I have to turn them down a smidge.
I can tell you for solid fact that the pickup on my subray 5 is absolutely hotter than any of my other basses. I can leave the amp volume alone and switch to any other bass in my collection and hear a distinct drop in volume.
When i play this one, i usually run the volume on the bass at about half and control it from the amplifier.
But yes, if you are getting distortion (particularly at very low volume levels) the first thing i would check would be the battery. It’s always good to solve a 2 dollar problem rather than chase a many dollar solution.
One common thing with ceramic pickups is that they are usually (not always) hotter as ceramic magnets are much stronger than AlNiCo. One side effect here is that ceramic is actually cheaper as well so a lot of inexpensive basses have ceramic pickups.
The thing is, I also greatly prefer the types of tones you get out of ceramics and many very good, top notch pickups are ceramic. In fact both of my favorite P pickups are - these are pickups I like better than Fralins, Bareknuckle, etc.
One case where inexpensive is not the same as bad 