I have commisioned EMG and Seymour Duncan to make me discreet buffered gain stages for the Lane Poor pickups I was using them . They are completely different in function than the redeemer . In simple terms it can be called a buffer but it doesn't function as a traditional buffer . As far as price the 120.00 is a reatil price and not the selling price .
I was looking for an old thread on this... but this will do.
Pete, with all due respect, a buffer is any device that presents a high impedance load for the pickups, and a low impedance load to drive the cable. It isolates--
buffers--the pickups from the cable, and/or controls. Technically speaking anything that does that job is a buffer. Almost all active devices used for audio have a buffer on the front end. This is true of a bass preamp with active tone controls, or your amplifier. The thing you want is to get the buffer as close to the pickups as possible, and before the cable.
On the old thread I had commented that I felt the Redeemer was a simple buffer, and apparently the people at Creation Labs say it's not. They also said it's not a transistor or op amp... but that leaves no other class of active devices. They also claim it's patent pending, but I looked, and they did not file any patent application I could find.
I felt the claims were rather outrageous, especially the one about getting more sustain because of the lack of loading on the pickups, which they claimed also loads the strings. And that's just not possible. If that were the case, a bass with no pickups or even just unplugged from the cord would sustain more, and that doesn't happen.
The one thing I did not try was disconnecting the battery from the Redeemer. I was more interested in seeing if it sounds any different from a FET or op amp buffer you can make for under $10. I had commented that a simple FET buffer would do the same thing, and sound the same as the Redeemer.
So a forum member (cybersnyder) was kind enough to loan me (and very patient since I had the thing much longer than intended) a Redeemer to try out.
So without further ado, here is a shoot out of some active devices. You can be the judge. I'm doing this as a blind test, with a clip of the bass run passive as a control. Any distortion or buzz heard is from my recording levels, and not the devices, and the buzz is due to all these things not being in a shielded control cavity. One device was slightly hotter than the rest, but I did not change recording levels at all during the tests, which were done one after another.
All clips were recorded with the same bass (SGD Scorpio 5 string with Neo Series 3 pickups) plugged directly into a Roland Digital mixer and recorded into TC Works Spark XL. No EQ was used at all. The signal was entirely in the digital domain. The pickups are running through a 500K blend and 500K volume pot. The volume was on full. The tone did not change with any of the units when I turned the volume down, which is a hallmark of a buffer.
I tried to play basically the same run each time. I played the bridge pickup first, then the neck, and then both.
Besides the passive clip, you will hear the Redeemer, an EMG BTC set flat, and a FET buffer. The clips are
in random order and only marked A, B, and C.
So first here is the bass totally passive.
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Now the test clips:
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OK, so which is which?
(I'll give the answers later)
