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fuzzfactor | 2 days ago
Eminently separable, but it's good to be aware of the tradeoffs.
Not magic at all, physics.
It's good to understand that high-impedance is not the biggest deal, but one thing about the magnetic pickups that not everybody realizes is the way that plugging directly into a tube (pre)amp basically magnetically couples the strings to the grid of the input tube.
And that grid has no further physical connection to any other components in the circuit, not even within the same tube, except for clouds of electrons and the flow that occurs among the electrodes.
That way your music basically starts out being sprayed through space directly from the strings which create the magnetic signal.
The thing about high-impedance is the way the relatively minuscule resistor values between the amp's input jack and the input grid's tube pin are so insignificant by comparison to the pickup internal impedance, that resistance might as well be zero.
The only reason there is a resistor in between the input jack and the input grid anyway is to accommodate a high-impedance input with better stability under wider conditions than otherwise.
Now you can get a righteous sound with any number of pedals in between the guitar & amp, especially if the battery power is used to boost the signal to more than the guitar puts out magnetically, and it's been the mainstream for so long people almost never consider doing it any other way.
It's just not the same magnetic coupling from the strings to the tube, you can't have both unless it's a tube pedal.
I've designed lots of solid state circuits too and there is plenty of excellence when coupling the same magnetic pickup directly to a silicon or germanium crystal lattice and going from there. Whether it's pedals or a pure solid-state amp. Instead of using any tubes at all.
Also some people prefer having tubes only for the audio output section, coupled to the magnetic speakers through the antique-style audio output transformer the old-fashioned way.
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