I have collected a few pre-amps/acoustic processors over the last five years. Given a price range of $30 to $300 people ask questions. Mostly either Q: "Which is the best" A: Wait for it... "It depends" -or- Q: You have this and this so how come you use 'that' all the time? A: Well, that's what this review is about.
A little bit about how/what I play, which DOES influence what I use: Venues tend to be all over the map. Loud bars with crappy acoustics, coffeehouses with extremely reverberant rooms (lots of windows) leading to lots of acoustic mud. Small intimate mostly acoustic settings both indoor and outdoor. Outdoor festivals with lots of people. Obviously there's some variety. The two things that tend to remain constant are that I'm playing two or three different instruments during most of the larger performances, and the fact that I'm tending to blend into the sound of a group rather than stand out, with some few solo turns where I *do* need to stand out a bit. So it's usually about blending in or cutting through rather than climbing up on my "awesome very acoustic sounding" horse very often.
The instruments all have high impedance piezo pickups on them. The mandos have K&K style dual body mounted pickups (actually from jjb-electronics.com, recommended.) the fiddle has a pickup built into the bridge and the electric fiddles have built in pre-amps, so having an external pre-amp for impedance matching purposes isn't strictly necessary but is beneficial.
Note: I like things that are battery powered, partially because there tends to be lower noise/hum than on AC plus there's just a bunch less setup hassle and cords to trip on. I've never had a battery failure during a gig due to changing beforehand and regularly using the voltmeter I carry.
At purely acoustic venues there are no pedals or pre-amps so it's kind of a non-issue. I do sneak my microCube in under/behind my chair for sound reinforcement sometimes. You can't always get away with that, but when you can it helps quite a bit. Ya don't wear out as fast, and it tends to sound better if you can back off and go for tone rather than volume. Plus I do play better if I can hear myself.
Bringing a bunch of stompboxes into that sort of situation is going to get you a cease-and-desist order.
The Contenders: In the order I got them
Behringer ADI21 acoustic emulator and pre-amp: $30-$40
http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/ADI21.aspx
Zoom (Samson) A2 acoustic multi-effects pedal: $100
http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/a2/
Fishman Aura Spectrum DI acoustic pre-amp and mic emulator: $320
http://fishman.com/products/view/aura-spectrum-di
The Behringer actually works quite well, especially for the price.
The Good stuff:
The EQ section works like it ought to and having a knob for changing the mids center frequency is a nice touch. The DI does what it's supposed to do and seems pretty transparent. The ground lift switch does it's job if there's a DI hum problem, though I haven't had much issue with that when it's battery powered.
The 'Blend' knob is interesting and sometimes useful. Depending on who you ask, it's supposed to make your electric guitar sound more acoustic -or- it's supposed to add 'warmth' or 'Tube-Pre' character. I can't speak to the electric guitar part of that, It does add something good, for some instruments, if used sparingly and with some EQ tweakage once you have turned it on a bit. Plan to spend some time really listening to this effect from the PA out 'in the house' to see what effect it has on the entire range of your instrument.
The not so good stuff:
If you step on it it breaks. There is a 'stomp button' on it for cutting the effect in and out but I haven't found any reason to actually use that. It seems sturdy enough. Maybe if you were using it as a solo-boost on an instrument that already has a preamp? Haven't tested that. If you step on the upper part of it where the knobs are it breaks. Period. Dropping it doesn't work so good either. Granted that's true of a lot of pedals, but this one seems slightly more fragile than most.
Battery life sucks. A good new alkaline will get you through a two hour show. Maybe three hours. Never four (at least on mine) A high bucks lithium 9V (a real one, not one that just says 'lithium technology' or some similar marketing BS) will get you a bit longer, maybe an hour+. The battery door isn't bad. Note the 'stomp button' does NOT turn the unit off even though the indicator light goes out. It's sucking batteries until you unplug it. Doesn't work worth a crap on rechargeables.
There is no anti-feedback or phase inverter to help with feedback. The EQ isn't really set up to help with that either.
>>> Summation: it's a good pre-amp, a good DI a pretty good EQ, especially for the price. I wouldn't gig with it without having a backup...and a spare battery.
The Zoom A2
The good stuff:
Does an amazing number of things well. Maybe not super exceptional at any one thing, but 'pretty darn good' at everything. There's several types of settings for piezo and magnetic pickups, a number of different mic emulations for a broad variety of guitars (and one of the 12 string settings is kinda useful with Mando) or a 'Tube-Pre' setting with a lot of tweakability for other instruments.
The six band EQ works quite well. The highest and lowest 'bands' are of the shelving type. If it doesn't quite do what you want you can reset it for 'parametric' type EQ. The cool thing is that the EQ settings can be different for every patch. Say you get things set about how you'd like. You hit Save and select 'A0' as where to save it. Then you copy the whole thing to 'A1' and tweak the gain and EQ for how you want it during solo breaks. Maybe a little more upper-mid and a little less bottom bass and very high. Save again. Copy to A2, add some reverb and chorus. Save. Now you have settings for 'regular' playing and two styles of solo and you can bounce between them with the up and down stomp buttons. It's so fast switching patches that you can do it during a note and only notice the smallest hiccup.
There's four separate banks of ten patches each so setting up for four instruments is a breeze. The display and six LED's work better than I had thought. You can read it on a wide variety of stage conditions, though direct sunlight can be a problem. The tuner is not the fastest, but it works pretty well. Being able to mute the output for tuning or switching instruments is very useful. The noise reduction system is pretty good, though keeping the settings there on the subtle side works best.
The compressor and limiter system works fairly well if not overused. On the higher compression settings I found it somewhat unmusical. Can add some noise too.
I find the different delays, choruses and reverbs to be quite nice sounding. Sure you can max out a bunch of things and then listen through headphones and you will hear artifacts, but not under any 'normal' circumstances. Subtlety is the key as usual. I find the stereo ensemble chorus to be a very useful 'thickner' once set correctly and with a touch of reverb on it. Delay can be set with the tap tempo button or with an external 'momentary' footswitch. In fact there's a number of things that can be turned on or off if you plug in an external footswitch... or, an external volume pedal which could also be used for other things like Wah. You can even control pedal sensitivity and linearity.
There are output adjustments similar to speaker cabinet sims if you want that sound when sending direct to PA or headphones, haven't found that part all that useful though. One of the cool parts is that there's enough processing horsepower to use all the above effects at once. You can't add two delays or anything like that, but there aren't many other tradeoffs. And, ...it'll do a whole show on rechargable AA's.
The not so good stuff:
No distortion effects. Programming is kinda clunky for the first 20 min. until you figure out that the three knobs do pretty much the same thing in almost all the important modules. There's some incomprehensible stuff as they try to use the 8 segment LED display to 'spell' things that will leave you running to the manual the first couple times. The manual's actually not bad. Low battery indicator doesn't give much warning.
I didn't find the octave pitch shifter to be very useful. It doesn't track well for anything but a regular guitar and I didn't like the sound of it much either. My Micro POG is much better at octaves and tracks a whole bunch better. 'course one of those costs as much as two A2's and it doesn't do anything else...
There's no balanced (DI) out. To get DI and USB out and a built in volume/effect pedal you buy the A2.1u for twice as much. May be worth it to some folks.
This is now the main and frequently only pedal I bring to most gigs. I do bring an A/B switch box if there's going to be a lot of instrument swaps, but that's about it. Highly recommended.
Fishman Aura Spectrum DI
The good stuff.
This thing is just way cool. It doesn't do as many things as the Zoom but what it does it does very well. Probably the best choice for recording, supplementing or even replacing the microphones. If you only use a single instrument or only swap at gig breaks (so you'll have time to re-tweak knobs) it's very gig-worthy. Even though you won't be able to hear the difference in refinement at many venues. ...Maybe a concert hall...
Anyway, this thing is cool. I'm still experimenting with the downloaded sound processing options. Some sound 'images' definitely work better than others.
I'm still getting used to this one and only time will tell if it supplants the A2 for gig use. It's already 'The Tool" for home or recorded use. In that case I'm probably post processing for all the stuff I would normally be doing in the Zoom.
It does have one issue, and that's related to the K&K body pickups in my Mandos. None of the 'images' are recorded that way, so finding something that really nails-it is proving to be hard.
The fiddle with the in-bridge (Bradivarius) pickup is a little easier match.
Wish they had a few cello images to try.
So: My 'take' on it all:
Behringer if you're low on dough.
The Zoom if you have just a few more nickels, and it's probably still the winner for loud venues.
Aura is a great recording tool and would almost certainly be The Winner if I played acoustic guitar with an under-saddle pickup.
Additional note: the other little box in the photo is a EH Freeze pedal. It freezes the current sound. Hit a chord, tromp on it, play over the chord. Lift up when it's time to change chords. Also useful for Celtic drone sounds.
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