Site last updated .
This particular page was created 07/04/2004 and last updated 28/08/2004
Site updates |
| | The Sound Checker is a fairly inexpensive piezo transducer that comes in three slightly different flavours:- Sound Checker Original - with an attached lead and jack plug
- Sound Checker Internal - with an end pin jack socket
- Sound Checker Original S - with a short lead and a jack socket
The transducer is the same for all three, so which you should choose depends on how you're going to install it.It's a decent pickup that tend to produce a nice round sound and a moderately high output level. It looks good too. The ones I've got are encased in wood and blends relatively well into the looks of an acoustic instrument. This may be important to you if you're going to install it externally on a high-end instrument. It's not nearly as versatile as Sound Checker wants you to think though: - The mellow sound makes it unsuitable for instruments with lots of treble, such as a standard western guitar.
- The large contact surface is rather tricky when we're talking about an archtop guitar or mandolin.
- It's too heavy for banjos and resonator guitars.
- The sheer bulk of it makes it hard to position on smaller instruments.
It seems to work really well on mellow-sounding (folk- and nylon-) guitars though. It is also a very good flattop mandolin pickup (if you can just find a place to put it) and for larger sized mandolin family instruments it's marvelous!I've tried this pickup on these instruments:
Two Sound CheckersInspired by K&K double sensor aproach I've done some experimenting with using two Sound Checker transducers on one instrument. So far I haven't found this to be very useful. It did improve the sound sometimes, but only on instruments where some other pickup worked better anyway.I tried two Sound Checkers on these instruments Back to index
| |
|