pickup chamber with animated spectral analysis
I’ve been playing with that ‘added pressure adds bass response’ idea, for use with these piezo pickups. I made a little wooden chamber that would let me add light pressure, as with the bridge pickup design. It would be held down with a clamp for testing, but would isolate that pressure from the piezo itself.
Anyway, I made a bunch of recordings, two for control, and eight with a range of pressure in the chamber. The controls were made with the pickup taped to the front of my zouk with double-sided tape (standard attachment), and with the pickup directly clamped to the front (also a standard attachment) and come first and second in the recording. The other eight were with the pickup in the test chamber, with increasing amounts of pressure on the crystal, applied by inserting paper as seen here:
With thin cardboard and two sheets of paper
Note again that the clamp is not adding pressure to the disc in any way.
Audio samples in a single mp3, here. There is some extra noise in these recordings; I was trying the modular approach again and that’s the result. I think the TRS connectors are inherently noisy. But that’s a separate matter.
I also ran spectrographic analysis on each recording, and combined those into a single animated gif that cycles through the recordings in order. Here’s the key for both. The gif is repeating, so each frame is labelled in the upper left.
1: taped to top 2: clamped directly to top 3: in chamber, no paper 4: in chamber, thin cardboard (0.46mm) 5: in chamber, cb+1 sheet (+0.11mm) 6: in chamber, cb+2 sheets (+0.21mm) 7: in chamber, cb+3 sheets (+0.31mm) 8: in chamber, cb+4 sheets (+0.42mm) 9: in chamber, cb+5 sheets (+0.52mm) 10: in chamber, cb+6 sheets (+0.63mm)
You’ll note in both the graphs and the audio that bringing in the chamber at all, even with no additional crystal pressure, caused a big drop in high-end oversensitivity, and boosted the low-end. That was interesting; I have suspected for a while that the crystal side of the disc would actually be better as a source-facing element, but there are physical issues to doing that, since the wires have to attach on that side.
Adding pressure continued to boost low-end response through test 7, without inhibiting high-end response. After that, I think additional pressure began to overcome the benefits, and you see a return to a more midrange-heavy sound - though in all cases, I think it’s better than either traditional mount.
This is consistent with tests made in the bridge pickup from last week, and reminds me of a diagramme I saw of a period crystal microphone that implied the crystals themselves would be set up forward-facing.
Anyway, data! And lots of it, for lots of your crystal/piezo experimental needs.
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