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Double Bass ehrlund contact pu-mike

#561
stefaniw80401 said:
On my Ehrlund I cut off the male 1/4" plug and soldered the wire ends to a female 1/4" jack attached to my tail piece. I get a 60Hz hum that somewhat goes away when I touch the common metal of the jack. What can I do to fix this?
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solder it again properly.
 
#562
stefaniw80401 said:
On my Ehrlund I cut off the male 1/4" plug and soldered the wire ends to a female 1/4" jack attached to my tail piece. I get a 60Hz hum that somewhat goes away when I touch the common metal of the jack. What can I do to fix this?
Click to expand...

Did you use a quality jack? Did you possibly reverse the leads when you soldered them? How about your cable(s) - good quality, properly shielded (have you switched them out to eliminate them as culprits?)
 
#563
Actually, it should work fine even if the leads are reversed as their is no case (chassis) ground. Indeed, it would seem to be an error in soldering but Mark's suggestions about checking the cables are good ones. As I posted earlier re replacing the plug with a jack:
drurb said:
... I don't mean to sound like a soldering elitist but, if you don't have experience and really good soldering skills, you may not want to tackle this. The wire is very fine. I used a temperature controlled soldering iron, a desktop vise to stabilize the work, a scalpel, a hemostat to hold the wire in place, heat-shrink tubing and a heat gun. Just an FYI. ;)
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#564
It's probably not the highest quality jack. It's a surface mount jack that I got at Radio Shack. I cannot find anything better locally. I soldered the center lead from the EAP to the jack's tip solder lug, and the shield wires I twisted together and soldered to the jack's common lug. Mark, do you sell your female jack kit separately from the pickup?
 
#565
stefaniw80401 said:
It's probably not the highest quality jack. It's a surface mount jack that I got at Radio Shack. I cannot find anything better locally. I soldered the center lead from the EAP to the jack's tip solder lug, and the shield wires I twisted together and soldered to the jack's common lug. Mark, do you sell your female jack kit separately from the pickup?
Click to expand...
I recommend the Switchcraft 121 TS very highly. As I posted a while back, difficult as it is to believe, the specs on 1/4" phone plugs and jacks are not truly standardized. That can lead to poor connections with certain combinations. The Switchcraft jack seems to be designed to make secure connections with just about any 1/4" phone plug.
 
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#567
stefaniw80401 said:
It's probably not the highest quality jack. It's a surface mount jack that I got at Radio Shack. I cannot find anything better locally. I soldered the center lead from the EAP to the jack's tip solder lug, and the shield wires I twisted together and soldered to the jack's common lug. Mark, do you sell your female jack kit separately from the pickup?
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Yeah, it's probably the cheap Rat Shack jack that is contributing to the issue. Contact me off list, I'll take care of you. The switchcraft jack mentioned above is a very good option as well.
 
#568
Mark Gollihur said:
Yeah, it's probably the cheap Rat Shack jack that is contributing to the issue. Contact me off list, I'll take care of you. The switchcraft jack mentioned above is a very good option as well.
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Thanks Mark! I actually put in an order for a couple of items just now on your web site. Thank you also for including the jack. You are the best!
 
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#570
OK, a few things I want to share:
  1. I got the Rean jack from Mark Gollihur, and it helped a little with the 60Hz hum. The hum seems to come from handling the EAP pickup's triangular head, and seems related to flexing of the element. I hope this doesn't mean my EAP is dying!
  2. The Rean jack manufacturing tolerance may be off a little -- or maybe it's my instrument cables -- when I plug in my cable(s) to the Rean jack, the signal cuts out on the final 1mm of cable insertion. Both my Monster Bass gold plated cable and another high quality local store brand lifetime cable. I've worked around this by sliding a 1mm 1/4" I.D. rubber O-ring on my cable end. Anyone else have this problem with some of your jacks and cables?
  3. Someone else here tried this -- mounting the EAP pickup on the back of the bass over the sound post. This worked OK, so I fiddled around other places on the back, and right behind the bass bar worked even better. My bass is a flat back, so your mileage may vary. My top is so resonant that I got a lot of wolfiness when I put the EAP on the top...just below the bridge over the bass bar was the best I found -- but a bit wolfy. Now, on the back I get a fairly flat response, and much less wolfy -- which means I get way more gain before feedback now, and a tighter sound.
  4. I have to remove my EAP twice a month, so I use a guitar pick to take its place and save that spot.
 
#571
FWIW. I had a Rean jack (manufacturer installed) on another pickup. It actually wouldn't work with some of my cables. It drove me absolutely batty trouble-shooting one day.

I don't know if it was an off-tolerance mistake, or what, but once I had it replaced with a high-end Neutrik jack all my problems went away. I never got the chance to try another Rean, because my local go-to guy only stocks Neutrik and Switchcraft.
 
#572
Rean is a division of Neutrik, so it should be high quality. I have a Switchcraft 121 TS coming and will solder that one on. DRUB sez it is the most compatible jack out there.

I had the Rean jack installed professionally at local electronics repair shop, so I know it was done correctly (WRT EAP wire stripping, iron temperature and pre-tinning) -- solder job looks great too. It worked great at the shop when the tech plugged it in with his cable. But with all of my cables at home, the signal cuts out in the final 1mm of cable insertion. An O-ring on my cable end got me thru gigs last weekend.
 
#573
I had bought a couple of expensive cables not too long ago as backups. One was a Monster, another was a Planet Waves with a funny looking oversized tip. Both were supposed to be "designed to fit more snugly in the jack" to prevent exactly this sort of problem. Both, when inserted into the jack that comes with the Full Circle pickup, caused signal distortion due to vibrations in the bass while playing. It was maddening. If I wrapped a rubber band around the sleeve at the very bottom, they would stay put, but this was not a long term solution. I gave them away and bought a second version of the cable I already had. Sadly, I don't know the name of the brand I use, but the cable is by Belden and the 1/4 ends seem to be by Neutrik. Never had any problem with the first one, but I wanted to keep a backup in the car. At any rate, based on my experience the problem may well be in your cables instead of the jack. It's worth a look, anyway.
 
#574
Chris Fitzgerald said:
... based on my experience the problem may well be in your cables instead of the jack.
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"Dammit Jim, I'm just a country doctor, not a neurosurgeon." Are we musicians or electronics technicians? Usually the (cheap) cable fails somewhere in the middle, or the connector ends fall apart, or the solder joints get pulled off. However, this 1/4" connector incompatibility experience is totally new and foreign to me in 30+ years of using amplification. I didn't expect to have connector incompatibility with quality (Rean, Neutrik, Switchcraft, Monster, Planet Waves) instrument cables and jacks.

With this new Switchcraft 121 TS jack that's coming, if my cables won't work with it, then I'll have to build a custom cable, with the corresponding Switchcraft male end, just for my EAP pickup (i.e. jack)... and then I better build a second cable while I'm at it for a backup!

Ugh ...
 
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#575
stefaniw80401 said:
"Dammit Jim, I'm just a country doctor, not a neurosurgeon." ......

With this new Switchcraft 121 TS jack that's coming, if my cables won't work with it, then I'll have to build a custom cable, with the corresponding Switchcraft male end, just for my EAP pickup (i.e. jack)... and then I better build a second cable while I'm at it for a backup!

Ugh ...
Click to expand...

Since the Ehrlund EAP two ground wires inside that tiny cable, I'm wondering if one of them isn't connected to the jack's negative terminal. Just a thought. I've only watched my technician wire the Switchcraft, but I'm glad I had him set it up.

Ric
 
#577
stefaniw80401 said:
However, this 1/4" connector incompatibility experience is totally new and foreign to me in 30+ years of using amplification. I didn't expect to have connector incompatibility with quality (Rean, Neutrik, Switchcraft, Monster, Planet Waves) instrument cables and jacks.
Click to expand...

A while back I was surprised to learn that there really isn’t a “standard” for ¼” phone plugs/jacks – yes, the plug itself is expected to be 1/4", but the length of the sleeve, where the separator is, how far from the end of the body the tip starts - it can actually vary a good bit.

And then you have manufacturers like Monster and others making them ever so slightly larger, to ensure better contact -- which is swell until you use a different "regular" cable and you've bent the jack contacts out to accommodate the wide plug.

So every once in a while, you might put together a cable with a pickup that aren’t quite “in spec” with each other, and therefore don’t make reliable contact. Planet Waves even made a cable for a while that had a threaded adjuster on it so that you could accommodate the slight differences in length specs for jacks and cables.
 

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