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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Strings reinforced sound in my listening room

Post Subject: Strings reinforced sound in my listening roomPosted by Romy the Cat on: 1/17/2013

Amy plays peaty much weekly chamber music. I listen them sometime and the idea to let her quartets to sound slightly bigger in homes, in the way how they would sound in concert hall, never left me. Of cause we are talking about an active extension of reverberation time at lower octaves. Conceptually it is simple but to make it “smooth” is not simple. It is not the last thing is that I have no experience of doing any sound reinforcement. Well, this I guess is good as I would not learn anybody bad experience.

So, I slowly began to look in the strings reinforcement direction. I desired to stays off the microphones as I do not need any HF pickup and I do not want to deal with feedback. I looks at some kind of contact pickup solution and after some research I ended up with Cherub contact pickups WCP-60V. I took Amy’s cheap African Alto that she does not use, attached 2 pickups, driving them to a cheap M-Audio microphone preamp and then in Macondo at whole system gain.

Well, if you think that I got what I wanted then you are mistaken. The installation clearly has not enough gain and I would need extra 10-12dB to pump of lower octave into the room. Also, if I listen a full range then I am not wild about the character of sound that I get. I do not think that a sophisticated character of sound is my objective but I did anticipate a better result. I do not want at this point to commit myself with higher quality of string pickups and sophisticated pre-amplification. Probably I need to add a line level gain and play more with it. I will post more about my progress.

The Cat

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