Input Impedances

[robin watson]

My acoustic amplifier has a 'Piezo' input, and therefore, I assume, a very high input impedance. My guitar uses an active pickup, designed to go into a line input, which has a considerably lower impedance, say 10K or so...

Is any kind of impedance mismatch likely to occur in this scenario? The guitar sounds OK through the amp, but wondered if it's not an optimum match.

R

 

[jhbrandt]

Robin,

No, you should have no problem plugging in a low impedance source to a high impedance input. - Unless the input pre has high gain. Other than that, you should have better than normal Low Frequency response.

You will not hurt your amp.

The very high input impedance of your amp is designed for piezo pickups directly. Probably around 10 million ohms, because a piezo element has an inverted impedance curve... very high for low frequencies and low impedance for high frequencies. That is why they sound so crappy when you use them directly into a low impedance input.

I hope this helped.

 

[robin watson]

Yes, that helped very much - it stopped me worrying about it, and taught me a thing or two along the way. Cheers!