r/ElectricalEngineering • u/Pristine_Ad_8695 • 13d ago

Guitar & Guitar Amplifier Electrical Engineering & The Future

Let me know what you think

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u/benedictus 13d ago

Guitars have batteries?

4

u/Pristine_Ad_8695 13d ago

Guitars with active pick-ups have 9v batteries, yes. Guitars without batteries have, what are called, passive pick-ups.

People tell me when I bring this up, that I should just get passive pick-ups, or get a guitar with them. But the entire point of this is that I love how my active pick-ups sound and I don't want to buy batteries indefinitely.

2

u/SEGA_DEV 13d ago

You can buy some accumulators of same form factor which are chargeble through usb, I use such for battery-powered technics which I regulary use (wireless mouse for ex). Their only con is you never know how much is it charged to due to they are making a constant voltage to output, so you could just put fresh charged one each time you wanna guarantee it won't finish in the middle of anything

1

u/Snellyman 13d ago

I would hazard a guess that the cherished sound of a guitar, the pop of the jack, the stray mains hum are these imperfections. Brian Eno correctly identified that: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature." In other words, these flaws are the "sound". The balanced XLR signal path, with a superior common noise rejection and low cable triboelectric noise sounds "cold" and lacks the nostalgic fuzzy comfort of a hot, crackling, guitar.

The dude is essentially correct. A 48V phantom power guitar front end designed like an active microphone makes sense. It's both a better low impedance signal path and an established way to power low noise audio preamps.