Joined: November 2002 Posts: 266
Location: Tampa, Florida | Have there been any playable prototypes of a pure acoustic LX Ovation? I know the tone has to be significantly altered when it has to go through Ovation's pickup, which is plastic and not primarily designed for transfering the sound to the top. The new LX a/e's sound great, I would love to hear one with a bone saddle, scalloped LX bracing, contour bowl, etc. That may be an awesome acoustic guitar. |
Joined: February 2002 Posts: 5750
Location: Scotland | While in theory it would make sense that removing that big lump of a pickup should make a difference to the acoustic tone, in reality the actual difference is so subtle as to be not worth considering. The sound of any guitar is the sum of all it's parts and there are so many other things going on in an instrument which contribute to it's final sound, that changing one little detail does not impact significantly. I have a custom made Ovation based on the old 12-Fret Folklore. It has a handmade bone saddle over the pickup. Just to satisfy my curiosity I swapped the bone saddle pickup with a current OPP and made a microphone recording of each to state of the art digital recording equipment using a pair of $1500 Microtech-Gefell microphones. No-one but me could hear a difference, and I had to really listen. Back in the early 80's I owned a pair of Folklores, a 1614 and a 1114, acoustically there was nothing between them. |