| I keep talking about guitars all the way here. This is what most people are interested in and after all this i supposed to be a guitar site. Most of the content on this page apply to other stringed instruments too though. Take this overview for what it's worth. There are lots of details missing, and some may be coloured by my personalø opinion. It shouldn't be that far off though. 1. Pre-historic timesBefore the birth of the piezo-transducer you had two choices: You could use a magnetic pickup and get a sound like an electric guitar, or you could place a microphone on a stand in front of your guitar. Lots of pain with very little gain - most people just gave up and went for the electic guitar instead.2. The stone ageBarcus Berry seems to have been the first to make the piezo-electric transducer available to the music world. It cost a fortune and sounded horrible, but it worked.3. The first proletarian upriseShadow introduces affordable piezo transducers. They sound even worse than Barcus Berry and the feedback problem is terrible, but again: it works.(Unlike Barcus Berry, Shadow has managed to stay in business and evolve newer better products all the time.) 4. Take it to the bridgeOvation puts the transducer into the bridge of the guitar rather than on the soundboard. This makes the transducer easier to use and imporoves the sound considerably. Horribly expensive though, and many people objected to Ovation's guitars being made partly from synthetic materials rather than wood.5. The second proletarian uprise - or: The Asians are comingTakamine and Ibanez "steals" Ovation's idea, reduce the prices and build wooden guitars with built-in bridge transducers. This is when things really started rolling!6. The empire strikes backThe first generation of bridge transducers provided a quantum leap forward, but there were still room for improvements.Fishman refined the idea and managed to get considerbly improvements in sound quality. For long their bridge transducers was the state of the art, and the prices were accordingly. 7. The return of the AsiansWell, Fishman improved the sound, and since their transducer was very popular, they were able to charge really high prices although the production costs weren't really that much.Enter the CopyCats! Affordable Asian-made Fishman-clones with Dishman-quality (or close to it at least) at very pleasant prices. 8. State of the artTime for the final(?) stage. L. R. Baggs and a few others took the work Fishman had done further. Refining both the transudcer and the by now manadoty preamp they were able to get a realism out of the bridge transducers nobody had thought possible. (Actually I think Baggs has been around for almost as long as Fishman, but the world wasn't ready for it at first.)9. The quiet revolutionDuring the bridge transducer years, other people had been working quietly in the background. They realised the original soundboard transducer had a potential far exceeding the bridge mounted version, and slowly improved the technology. Others were working on developing workable "normal" microphones for guitars.Today there's a wild variety of solutions on the market. The bridge transducer is still very much alive, soundboard transducers exist in all varieties, price classes and qualities, there's the under-thebridge transducers that are a kind of compromice with some of the advatages of both, there are a number of microphones you can put into your guitar. There's even a resurrection of the magnetic pickup as a serious alternative! And there are combinations of two or more pickup systems. Quite confuing really. Most guitar manfucaturers and guitarists stick to the bridge transducer for now. For all its weaknesses it is easy to deal with, it's good enough for most and you know exactly what you get. But for those who are willing to make the effort, there are countless other options to investigate, and much better sound quality to be found. | ||||||||||