Prostheta

I'm not bothered really. It's far too ubiquitous to claim or trademark. It just means I need to do some actual thinking to find a unique identifier!

Looks like I'll have to be changing the name on the headstocks of my guitars. 

I don't hate it. If anything I like the idea of being able to use common existing components without modifying them for this sort of retrofit. There's a sizeable difference between the bobbin screw spacing of my TBH-11 and APH-1N. That's probably why Rob mentions that the bridge pickup preamp has a small "bump" as this implies both preamps have different levels of gain. More or less unity for the neck ("fingerboard" as he calls it) and a slightly hotter bridge. Did he also mention some sort of op-amp used specifically for pickups in that video?

"There isn't a custom op-amp made for a pickup until this one", nice grammar butchery.

The death of the LM-4250 might mean that EMG had their hand forced to move to a different op-amp, so maybe this is what he meant even though this is not what he said. It might simply be the same LM-4250 topology but remade enough not to need any sort of licensing to TI or whoever. More than likely it's an op-amp custom-made with ultra-low current consumption with frequency performance comparable to that of the LM4250 with the Iset resistor hard-wired internally. The shots of the preamp in production shows something like 3-4 SMD resistors and four SMD chip capacitors, so I'd almost put money on this being the same preamp as used in the 81 or maybe the X series, however that preamp differed. Maybe it was only a different Iset value to improve frequency range and reduce compression in-circuit.

Speculation anyway. I think an 81 preamp circuit built around a TL071 or OPA1655 would be fine.

In fact, look at what EMG do with their "Retro Active" pickups. This to me looks like a standard pickup with an external preamp bolted onto the rear as I proposed.

https://www.emgpickups.com/guitar/fat-55-set.html

I haven't put a lot of thought into it, since I know that my resources are stretched fairly thinly right now, what with building the CNC. It would be a great way to modernise my #1 Ibanez, however it might make just as much sense to have a preamp in the cavity instead. It's just super cramped, what with being an HSH configuration and a thin body S.

Very cool. I've half been considering whether to make a small batch of balanced preamps to fit onto the rear of existing commercial pickups because of the stray earth noise we seem to get in Finnish electrics. EMGs and Fluence are dead silent, but I get noise even with basic passive humbuckers.

Sounds like a longer scale as well? There's so many variables that go into a design. Sounds nice and tight though. EQ'ed out that would work really nicely.

This is true. My own wiring is always as weird as it needs to be. I only ever wire my tone pot to my neck pickup for example. That and me using active circuits wherever possible tend to exclude most of the weird interactions that are judged as being "the character of..." or a plain old weirdness.

Factor into this the "vintage" and the "modern" variants in how the tone pots are brought into the circuit.

Post photos of the cavity and the switch wiring. It may be obvious from a visual inspection.

5 hours ago, Alex M. said:

I have big questions about the level of your engineering education.    

This adds nothing to the discussion. 

It's a shame that people don't use underwound pickups as much for metal. They lose out on so much touch sensitivity and punch. Sounds good. I presume that was double-tracked?

Agreed. In general the TL071 when run as a buffer without any sort of filtering will do a number of things to a basic pickup. Primarily it eliminates load on the coil, however as to the exact physics of this I am not the expert. This being said, a pickup that is heavily loaded becomes muddy and indistinct. "Smear-y" I guess I would say. A basic unity buffer allows a pickup to sound as it does naturally without losses from parallel resistances, cable capacitance creating a LPF that wools up the treble. That sort of thing. They also seem to reduce the tendency of the pickup to be prone to extraneous noise, especially when run as a pure differential amplifier without reference to ground.

The negative commentary that many people repeat about actives is based around them hearing pickups without the artifacts that passive have, which a lot of us have become used to, and our equipment have grown up around. Fishman Fluence are great, however I think the HF Tilt is a drastically under-mentioned option for those that think actives have too much high end. It's simply that passive circuits commonly lose a lot of that and we are blissfully unaware.

If it's adding clarity to the low mids, that's worth the price of entry alone. When that range gets smushed, everything gets messy and sounds "cheap".

Sounds good! What are your observations on this version?

Just saw this in my RSS feed. Might be of interest, going back to a previous conversation about traditional motifs and how the nature of materials and working methods have a direct relationship.

https://blog.lostartpress.com/2023/10/10/drawing-a-symmetrical-acanthus-leaf/

Oh totally. This is why I find it so amusing that people get lost in high concept designs and weird stuff when really it comes down to basic balance, and even then....it varies.

I'm biased though. My favourite acoustics have gloss over their Rosewood headstock veneers. The balances are completely different to that rustic Martin styling.

It might be down to the nature of the playing or the recording, but it has a nice intimate voicing if that makes sense? A detailed and in-person sort of sound rather than a big booming projector. I suspect that's the recorder.

I have to say, a gloss coat over the headstock would tie it together a little more. It seems out of place on some level. Call me crazy.

It's very satisfying and important experience to figure out exactly how various contributions have altered and influenced the final instrument. All the buzzwords and repeated falsehoods on the Internet become meaningless by comparison. I look forward to how the comparison works out.

I presume you saw the most recent Clickspring video on hand-engraving with a power engraver? Not so useful for wood applications, but interesting nonetheless.

To be fair, I have zero idea any more. The motif is so common and in use beyond the context for which it bore specific meaning that it's almost like the Anglo-Saxon precursor to the "cool S".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

Fleur-de-Lys. They're a very common motif.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleur-de-lis

I like it. When things overlap there is more interest and almost an implication of layering. It makes me wonder how the marquetry "sand shading" technique would look in these instances, even though of course it wouldn't be possible.

How about a TLV9041 instead?

https://www.ti.com/product/TLV9041

Ultra low operating current and can be run from a lithium battery. 5,5v maximum supply is more than you need.

No idea. I was going to suggest Duosonic, but I guess not! It may be some random idea. The tune-o-matic and string ferrules are odd.

A cursory look at the schematic suggests that this might be the case. The resistor 1004 (1MOhm) and the adjacent capacitor don't have corresponding links in the schematic other than earth. The through hole plating will go through to a common plane, so yes, ground plane. The tape is probably just to hold the steel bars in place, even though the magnet under the bobbins clipped into the PCB should do this anyway.