I have been using the Remic 5200LB for more than a year now. It is a nice handmade mic, which is not intrusive and has a good sound and is very feedback resistant - the most feedback resistant mic I have ever tried on my fiddles.
My first setup comprised a Sennheisser G3 system going into a Headway EDB-1 (discontinued) preamp for EQ. After discovering that the allowed wireless frequencies in Denmark was not allowed within the UK, I ditched the Sennheisser (but I would like to be wireless so I am searching for a system)....
I have been doing some research on blender/mixer preamps on behalf of a couple of my colleagues, who needed to blend a mic and pickup.
I came about this system I did not hear of before: Vintage Revolution Acousticbox and thought I would share my findings with you.
The unit is actually designed for Upright Bass and it features two channels, an active (phantom power) and a passive channel (designed for pickups). Both channels have 1 band of parametric EQ and mid-level adjustment. When summed an additional 3 band graphic eq is available.
Clark Huckaby is a musician a musician, audio electronics technician and recording engineer. I found him while searching for good articles on amplification of fiddle.
While this article is a bit old I really found it to be quite interesting with some good info and observations.
It covers 4 subject: Microphones, pickups, preamps/amps/monitors and a chapter on how a pickup "hears" the bowing.
A couple of years ago I tried the Kurmann Soundpost pickup, which is popular among Irish fiddlers.
An unusual idea, which placed the pickup in the soundpost of your bowed instrument.
(The soundpost is the small piece of wood hold in place inside the violin, viola, cello or doublebass between the bottom and the top plate.)
Now there is another soundpost pickup on the market sold thorugh the Violorama website.
Where the Kurmann Soundpost had a special cable running from the instrument to a bespoke preamp with internal EQ filters. The Violorama soundpost has a more common RCA plug and a RCA cable to XLR plug with a built in FET buffer preamp with no EQ.
Here is a video of the Headway vl-3 pickup. An in-bridge pickup with 2 piezo elements.
This test is made a follows:
"The VL3 Bridge Pickup on Chinese made Violin was recorded onto Hard Disc, via Headway EDB-1 DI Box, recorded with flat EQ. This was played back via EDB-1 DI Box into Headway Shire King 120 Acoustic Amp, which was Mic'd up using AKG C414 Condenser Mic., to achieve a recording of live type sound, using all Headway gear entirely from pickup No microphones were used while recording fiddle.
Amp controls were set with flat EQ, tiny amounts of EQ cuts were applied from EDB-1 on 5 band EQ controls ( 0-3 dB) to balance room, Instrument and speaker cabinet sounds etc. A small amount of reverb was the only outboard treatment used."
I would of course like to test this one as well. This test is good, but Headway is clearly is making this sound as good as possible (why should they not?), I would like to hear a sound sample before eq and reverb was added.
Here is the third part of the Fishman Aura Spectrum DI test.
This time I will be going through the images one by one so you can compare the effect the different images can have on one instrument pickup combination.
You can see the two first parts of the Fishman Aura Spectrum tests here.
Here is the first part of my tests with the AURA spectrum DI.
A couple of years ago Fishman released the first preamp with the Aura technology inside. It enabled musicians playing acoustic instruments to improve on their amplified tone with the help of digital modeling.
The Aura Spectrum DI is the next generation of this technology in the shape of a versatile preamp and DI.
