Hey SK3RED, I can totally understand where you're at. I think there are two things to look at based on your post: Overall gain. Overall tone. I checked out your guitar on Sweetwater's site and being a Jackson, I would expect it to be pretty good. The specs look solid and their "high output humbuckers" sound like they should be giving the preamp enough juice to make things happen. It's possible that the pickups have too much low-end to make crisp, gain-y attack happening, but again, being a Jackson, I would assume they're "voiced" for gain. The pickup height relative to the strings could also cause weak output. I would adjust the bridge pickup height to have about 1/8" of gap between the top of the pickups and bottom of the strings. You might need more space on the 7-string, but that's a good place to start. You could maybe have some sort of wiring issue in the guitar as well. A partial short in the output jack? Maybe something up the volume pot? Not saying this is the case for sure...But it's stuff to look at. Assuming the guitar is all good and is setup well, you should be getting good signal into the preamp. If you're not getting sufficient gain then there could be a problem with the 9004 itself. These things are about 30 years old now and it could have some issues. A bad input jack, a bad pot, maybe something in the actual gain stages of the preamp. I don't recall seeing anything too crazy inside the unit as far as repairing it goes, so if it's not happy, you should be able to get it repaired pretty easily. As for the overall tone being "fuzzy and muffled" I should probably point out my use of the "power amp" part of the Mooer Radar. Without the power-amp emulation, the preamp is a bit "flat" sounding. At 9:12 in the video I show a (bad) pic of the Mooer power amp settings. I wasn't using any of the EQ in the Mooer, nor any EQ in the DAW. The power amp emulation though did have a pretty hefty presence boost (6.0) and was cranked up pretty high (lots of input drive and a fairly high output which is what you do in Marhsall land). I do not recall the power amp section adding much, if any "grit" or "gain" to the signal, but it did add "life" and "sparkle" to the signal. For you, I'm not sure if the "power amp" is still emulated in the Neural plugin if you're only using the cabinet emulation. I would think not but some modellers tie the power amp output to the speaker/IR portion. There might be a "power amp only" setting in the amp block of the Neural plugin. If so...Turn that on and see how it goes. It should bring the "life" and "sparkle" to the sound. If the power amp emulation isn't an option in the Neural plugin, I'm sure there's something out there that can do it (and maybe for free). Check out Emissary from STL Tones if you haven't already. I use it's NadIR IR loader in the DAW when I'm doing serious recordings. The Mooer is used for real-time monitoring of the sound so I have an ultra-low latency sound to play with. The last piece of the puzzle is the IR. That's my Mesa 4x12 Oversized Recto straight-front cab. That particular IR I think has an SM7, an ancient Oktava ML16 ribbon, and I think an AKG C12 clone I made combined to make the IR. It's a micing setup I borrowed from John Petrucci during the recording of the Distance over Time record. He was using the SM7, a Shure 313 Ribbon, and a Mojave 201 condensor I think. I just used what I had as the closest variants of those mics and tried different positions and blendings until I had a combination I liked and rendered that to an IR. Let me know if you make an progress on things and if you're in the States, I could maybe take a look at your 9004 and see what's up.

These preamps usually go for $2-250 or so. If you can get one for $100 or less I'd consider that really good. Bear in mind, it uses a wall-wart power supply to make it go. Getting a replacement isn't hard to do. I want to say a replacement power supply is about $20 or so. Good luck with it!!

@@jamesgreenlee7033 its in really bad shape when it comes to looks, because the dude used it since he bought it new. Thats probably why its so cheap, but it works

Unfortunately not. It sold awhile back.

Right?? I was genuinely shocked when I fired it up.

Thanks man! I was honestly really shocked about the 9004. I didn't expect it to sound as good as it did. Fun stuff!!