Double Bass Wireless for DB?

[Don Hergert]

Hi @DoubleMIDI , mine are the TRS 2.4GHz transmitters with the hinge. I don't have them with me on the road now so I don't remember the brand, but there have been reports of vibration in the on/off switch with some of these, but mine have been fine.

My mounted mic pigtail converts from XLR to TRS mono, so I can use most common TRS mono cables, which is how I connected to the FOH on stage yesterday since I didn't bring my wireless dongles on this trip...

It was an unexpected stage gig, someone heard my DB playing and my wife's singing in a jam and asked if we could join the ensemble. It was fun, but if I had known it was going to happen I would have thrown my wireless in the RV before driving north 600 miles.

... Next time...

I haven't had interference issues with mine, yet.

 

[turf3]

I did a first trial, but am not sure yet what the results told me. Plus this was a living room trial, not on a bandstand. My amp is a first series Contra so there are low gain, high gain low Z, and high gain high Z inputs. I tried piezo-transmitter-receiver-amp, piezo-transmitter-receiver-preamp-amp, and piezo-preamp-transmitter-receiver-amp, each at all three inputs, and I did NOT take notes. But there were some combinations that seemed easily in range of being eq'd to a good sound.

Next up will be a matrix of options and taking notes, plus giving each combination a fair trial of equalization. I believe I can make this work for DB.

 

[Ryan in PDX]

I did a first trial, but am not sure yet what the results told me. Plus this was a living room trial, not on a bandstand. My amp is a first series Contra so there are low gain, high gain low Z, and high gain high Z inputs. I tried piezo-transmitter-receiver-amp, piezo-transmitter-receiver-preamp-amp, and piezo-preamp-transmitter-receiver-amp, each at all three inputs, and I did NOT take notes. But there were some combinations that seemed easily in range of being eq'd to a good sound.

Next up will be a matrix of options and taking notes, plus giving each combination a fair trial of equalization. I believe I can make this work for DB.

The ONLY thing that will load the piezo (offen erroneously referred to as "impedance matching"), is the thing plugged directly into the piezo. With the wireless first, the wireless will be the only load applied to the piezo, full stop. Nothing down stream can affect the behavior of the piezo - it is literally, physically, absolutely impossible. (it may sound different, but it won't be due to the impedance issue.)

The only time you should need the high Z input would be when the amp is directly connected to the piezo (with a cable). Any active circuit (preamp, wireless, fx board etc) between the amp and piezo means the amp cannot load the piezo, and said active circuit will have a low-Z output >99% of the time.

Piezo -> preamp -> wireless -> amp would be my first choice, and the configuration I would put money on sounding "the best" 100 times out of 100 (without knowing the details).

Caveat: If you're connecting the piezo (via cable) to a DI without an isolated "thru" channel (most DIs are this way), the load on the piezo will be the parallel combination of the input impedances of the DI itself and whatever is connected to the "thru" jack. For this reason, I prefer to use a DI after my preamp - that way the preamp is doing the loading, and nothing else matters in the physics dept.

In practice, the input impedance is only one of many factors affecting your sound, which is subjective in any case.