What do impedance effects SOUND like 

I was getting all hung up about whether my mic pre has enough impedance for my ribbon mic. This video has certainly illustrated the issue very well and put that worry to bed. Your previous video on the subject of impedance was also very informative. You have a new subscriber.

Awesome talk on impedance… you should do one on headphones impedance too.. that’s always a confusing topic as well !!

Seriously underrated videos you have there... thank you so much, you made it clear and audible! 🙏

Great to watch this after the technical video you posted.

Splendid video, so useful. In my case, I have a Fender Hotrod Deluxe amp, plus a Shure SM58 mic. I recently bought a Hohner Crossover C harmonica, so I bought a Shure A85F transformer. but the problem now is that I'm getting so high feedback noise even with minimum volume; the solution at this moment is to play the harmonica, like twenty feet away from the amp, which is not practical for rehearsing.

Great video

Great follow-up: thanks!

It’s important to realize that impedance is frequency dependent, and that this dependence will affect the timbre of the signal from the source device. Microphones that have buffer stages like condenser mikes and some ribbons should be less affected. But ribbon and dynamic mics have impedance curves that vary widely across the frequency spectrum as do piezos. With low impedance preamps, the frequencies that occur at the regions where the source impedance is high will be attenuated more than those frequencies that occur in lower impedance regions.

Thank you

Great videos. Really cleared things up for me! I'm wondering if playing both tracks at once and inverting one of them would help further demonstrate what part of the signal is being altered by the impedance mismatch. I worked on VSTs a while back and am now starting to learn the analog world. This will be fun to experiment with! Thanks for the videos!

Interesting. I took up stringed instrument making in my retirement and recently decided to add an integrated pre-amp/power-amp to my list of made in the shop items. Being my first pre-amp I kept the pre-amp based construction simple by not including tone controls. Also not wanting to make major cutouts in any of my nylon stringed instruments or change the saddle height I assembled a three disc array of piezo transducers that I hotglued to the soundboard under the bridge with a 1/4 jack mounted in the tailblock. The first trial was shocking in it had nearly no low end and sounded like crap squared. A check of the piezo disc used showed that it did not even come close to having a flat frequency response or output across the audio interval where in a sense it placed all its output weight at the high frequencies. I did plug the instrument into a factory made instrument amp that has tone controls and with bass emphasized I could make the pickups I installed sound OK but still not great. So, to salvage this first adventure in electrifying an acoustic instrument I decided to build a simple passive 3 band equalizer that I aim to place in line between the transducer output and the pre-amp. The equalizer is simply a high pass filter, low pass filter, and band or interval filter in parallel with each other and each having a 10k linear potentiometer at the filters output to adjust volume with. I remember the bands being as less than 80 hz, 80-3400 hz, and above 3400 hz. Hopefully this works well enough and once the parts come in the mail next week it will not take too long to find out.

awesome

Yeah I noticed when you plug a guitar straight into a mixer without a DI, it sounds slightly twangy and lifeless. To be honest though, for live situations like an open mic, with a fairly low quality PA, it never really seemed too much of a difference. Recording is different of course.

I have no idea why RU-vid recommended this video to me but ngl you kinda cute ☺️

Interesting videos! I learned something! Thanks! But if I may quibble. You start out with V = IZ (or V = IR). This formula is meaningless if either V or I, voltage or current, equals 0. So when you talk about "reflecting" voltage you could as correctly say "reflecting" current. There isn't one without the other. Sure, the amount of current you need to draw to measure voltage may be exceedingly small, but YOU MUST draw it. Further, in the end, it is current, not voltage (which is potential) that drives everything. You say that the ADC measures voltage but that's only because you choose to look at the V and not the I. You can't have one without the other. Therefore, you choosing voltage is arbitrary. And it leads to misunderstandings, in my view. What we want is enough voltage (potential) to generate the current (energy changes over time) to do everything. Naturally, the more potential (voltage) we have the better. That's why you focus on voltage, as we all do. BUT the truth is we always start with low voltages with microphones. That makes it very difficult to amplify them without losing fidelity (in my view, current, not voltage drives an ADC). In the transition from low voltage(current) to higher voltage(current), we must favor something in that energy transfer (in a preamp). In a sense, we draw the current (not the voltage) from a mic and create a higher voltage to create another current later. Would be curious to hear your thoughts. Your first video was great. But I feel if you clean/clear up some of your references to voltages and currents you can make an even better one. If you disagree with anything I wrote please let me know! THANKS!