Phil Leigh wrote: > 100x it is and the higher the better really. Electric guitar pickups > are a classic voltage transfer problem - a 1M impedance is ideal! > (1000x?)
Er, its more complex than that. High driven impedance is easier to drive, and better at some noise criteria, up to a point. Lower impedance inputs are easier to drive with longer cables. Electric guitars are very complex beasts. Well, the guitar is not complex, but the sound that you get is not a function of just the guitar or the guitar and player. The sound that you expect is a marriage of the guitar and the amp. Nearly all serious electric guitarists swear that tube amps are required, solid state just doesn't sound the same. Even the crappy speaker cones are important, it is the imperfect coupling of the speaker to the air, driven by a distorting tube, maybe with a overdriven transformer, that makes it sound right. Yet to get the best tone, you have to have a quality and short cable between the guitar and amp. 10 feet is best, 15 feet is pushing it. If you go longer, the sound changes, which is why pros use "DI" boxes for long runs. Guitar cables are weird, unbalanced and not well shielded. Most consumer hi-fi gear and most audiophile gear is fairly insensitive to preamp output impedance and amp input impedance. Most amps have between 47 kOhm and 100kOhm loads, with can be driven with next to zero current, so the preamps can be weak. Putting a strong amp in a preamp kinda defeats the purpose. Most audiophiles use short interconnect cables, so the loads are not too critical. (Some would argue that the short interconnects make $1000 interconnect cables silly). There is a trend towards putting the monoblock amps next to the speakers, and running short speaker cables, which requires long interconnects. IMHO, once you are talking ten feet of interconnect, you should be thinking balanced connections, XLR, etc. Preamps made a lot more sense when everyone used turntables. When your inputs are a SqueezeBox, or Transporter, or tuner or DVD player, many of the things that were justified are no longer very important. Of course, the fringe audiophiles have pre-preamps to handle the insanely low output of their $10,000 cartridges. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
