First, the cold hard truth. You will NEVER get a pickup to sound like your guitar. Period. Get used to that now, and we can make you happy. Otherwise, prepare to spend a HUGE amount of money just to be disappointed. I am sorry about that, but it is just a fact of life when it comes to acoustic guitars. Acoustic guitar pickups are, without exception, a series of compromises. The difference is in what compromise you find least offensive.
Now, of course, most people will tell you that they best sound comes from a mic in front of the guitar. This is conditionally true. IF you can get sufficient isolation, AND you are willing to stand PERFECTLY still, AND the mic is good, AND the engineer doesn't suck, AND the system is worth using, THEN and only then will the mic really do it. What this means, in practical terms, is that for small acoustic acts where you don't have to compete with a drummer or a banjo player, etc., you can make a mic work. The thing is, as soon as you get a loud instrument on stage, particularly drums, you can all but forget it. I've soloed guitar mics during shows, and the ONLY thing you can hear is the drummer. If he's on the far side of a large stage, it is workable, but that is about it. For anybody doing anything larger than solo or duo work, mics are a bad idea. Internal mics are only moderately better at rejecting stage noise, and they sound like crap, universally. To be avoided, at least as a single source.
And of course, with a nylon string, magnetic pickups are right out.
So you are left with vibration pickups, the most common of which are piezo crystals or films these days. (Not all of them are piezo, by the by - The round elements used by Highlander and D-TAR are actually basically just a highly capacitant insulated wire, and that capacitance is what sets up the signal. That wire, by the way, was designed for use as a trailing mic for submarines to use to hear what is behind them. They trail a length of the wire behind them, and it picks up the bad guys behind them. Or so Rick Turner told me, and since he designed both of those pickups...)
There are a LOT of variations on the piezo pickup. You go on a high end acoustic guitar board, and you will get at least a couple dozen different opinions. Most of the posts will be about how to get rid of the piezo "quack." Everyone talks about the quack, but I'm not sure the word means the same thing to us all (see my signature).
If you just remember the first thing I said, you will do fine with most of them. If volume is your primary consideration, then a Fishman or D-TAR undersaddle pickup can NOT be beat. There are others which may work as well, such as the Highlander, a B-Band undersaddle, a Pickup-the-World, etc. I have the most experience with the Fishman and the D-TAR. I personally like the D-TAR more than any of the others (though it is a very subtle thing that I like, which for some people can be overpowered by other issues). The D-TAR's main advantage is in the 18 volt electronics, which means that you have far more headroom than you will EVER need. The biggest advantage to this is a very smooth high end. To ME, this gets rid of the part of the "quack" that I find objectionable. But I am not at all wild about the D-TAR's low end, so if I was to use it I would be using it in conjunction with something else, and as I play steel-string that something would be a magnetic pickup. But that doesn't work for you.
The other type of piezos are the stick-on types, either temporary or permanent. The cheapest of these are just piezo crystals in some kind of packaging that get stuck on either the top or the bridge, from the inside or the outside. These are to be avoided, as they are cheap for a very good reason. The high-end ones include the B-Band, the Baggs i-Beam, and a few others. I've seen a lot of
the i-Beams, and they sound pretty nice, but they have BIG problems with feedback rejection. If you need to play in a band, they are not going to work, and that is typical of the stick-on pickups, either cheap or expensive.
And then you have the REALLY expensive solutions, which are the multi source systems. There are certainly dozens of these, and maybe hundreds. The most common one, by a significant margin, is the Fishman Blender systems. They have a half dozen different ones, but the basic concept is always the same: a Fishman undersaddle pickup with a small condenser mic inside the guitar. Now, I've already said that I don't like internal mics, and this is not an exception for me. They can be OK if you just mix in a little mic, but I usually like them more with straight pickup, personally. Then again, I know of some guitar players who are VERY picky about their sound who like the Blenders a lot, so you should certainly take my view as an opinion. Baggs makes a couple or what they call Dual Source pickups, and in concept they are pretty cool. Certainly, I like the idea of a i-Beam with an undersaddle more than a internal mic. But I HATE, passionately, the preamp modules they use. Not the electronics (though I would prefer an 18 volt system, particularly for the summing section), but for the case. It is WAY too big, and it gets stuck to the back of the guitar, so it can't help but have a pretty noticeable effect on the sound of the instrument acoustically. (The i-Beam, for all its bulk, is actually very light, so it is not a problem on the top, thank goodness). Now, the sound thing is not a HUGE issue, but it is there, and what I REALLY hate is that it is this big bulky, HARD thing inside your guitar which is not easily removable, but which can not be all that securely attached to the guitar. I look at those things, I and can only see major structural damage when the stickum lets go (and stickum regularly lets go).
If you cam into the shop, probably the first place I would steer you would be towards the Fishman Ellipse Blender. It is a inexpensive way of trying the mic/pickup combination, and it is minimally invasive (though you are looking at getting an endpin jack pretty much no matter what you get, just so as you are warned). Most of the people we have sold the Ellipse’s to have been happy with them, though I am not sure how many of them would have been just as happy with just the pickup. The preamp module is a little bulky, but it sits in a acoustically dead part of the top (right by the soundhole, which is far too stiff to move much), and I haven't noticed a difference.
The other thing to take into consideration is that all of these systems are extremely similar, and having the person install it use a familiar system is not at all a bad idea. We can do a faster and better installation with a system we are familiar with, which may well mean that it will sound better. So you should certainly talk to your repair person before you make a choice.
There I go getting all long winded again. Ooops.
Light
"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
