Dead electro acoustic

Bidley

So I had a gig today, plugged my acoustic in, and no sound. I managed to whack the volume on B-Band preamp up full, and almost max the mixer channel volume and got the tiniest bit of signal coming through. Changed the battery for a fresh one, swapped cables, no dice.

Is the preamp shot? If so, can I just put a passive undersaddle pickup in, attach it to the endpin jack and remove whatever existing gubbins remain? Apart from the actual preamp obviously, don't want a hole in the side.

John_P

Might be worth double checking the output jack - I've fixed a few where it has worked loose and the jack isn't quite connecting.

iirc a faith felt fine as the plug goes in but the way it is assembled meant the connector inside didn't touch the jack.   

ICBM

It's worth getting it checked out first, but yes if the preamp is shot it's possible to replace the pickup with a standard undersaddle strip (the B-Band is not compatible with other preamps unfortunately) and connect it directly to an endpin jack.

Which in my opinion is the way it should be done in the first place! But you probably knew that…

You will also need an external preamp, but this gives you so many more options.

Electro-acoustics: the work of Satan.

ftumch

As above again, a friend of mine recently took his electro into a well known chain of guitar shop after it stopped working, he was told it was beyond repair and was pointed towards a new one. He got someone else to look at it and it was just a 5min fix on the jack plug.

ICBM

ftumch said:

As above again, a friend of mine recently took his electro into a well known chain of guitar shop after it stopped working, he was told it was beyond repair and was pointed towards a new one. He got someone else to look at it and it was just a 5min fix on the jack plug.

Clearly it is worth getting it checked out by someone who does actually know what they're doing, but a fairly high proportion of failed electros *are* the preamp, and these days with surface-mount components and multi-layer boards they are often unrepairable. The shop person may have been going on experience… although also quite likely going on commission .

The problem for techs is that half the time, you go though a fairly awkward and involved process to get the whole thing out, test it all and find that as you expected in the first place, the fault is in the preamp, so you end up doing half an hour's work for nothing.

Bidley

Took to the tech today. Says he suspects the endpin jack, but he'll check it out. We'll see!