[jonfields45]

It came yesterday and I put it through its paces with an SM58, MiSi Trio equipped RainSong Concert Hybrid Parlor and a K&K Mini equipped RainSong Concert Hybrid WS.

I guess the news is there is not much to report. It sounds fine with plenty of volume potential. Whether it is plugged into the 12 volt adapter, or not, seems to of no importance (given a charged battery). I think the reverbs are very good. I did not notice anything missing in its bass response, which was reported by one other AGFer and held up my purchase some as I thought about it.... However I only have a Yamaha DBR10 at home for comparison (and the DBR10 needs to be on a stand or in monitor position to sound as good as the Fishman).

I had previously contacted Fishman to confirm the battery type. It is a Sealed Lead Acid battery which on the plus side have a standard universal charging method and are plentiful for future replacement. Lighter Lithium Ion battery packs tend to be quite proprietary and it is hard to imagine a Fishman product at its low sales volumes relative to say a PC driving a market for third party replacements.

A very high resistive impedance load brings out some badness for the K&K and it was subtly there (a loss of high end sparkle and something not quite right in the low mids). I have a 500K input impedance MOSFET buffer pedal and also a 1M strapping resistor and both took care of that problem. Several respected AGF contributors do not take K&K's warning seriously, and a pure capacitive high impedance load (usually avoided by audio designers) should not cause any issue which will make some of the posted experiments not applicable, but I think with this amp a K&K should be buffered first for best tone -- at least for a RainSong CH-WS.

[For the technically inclined, each K&K head can be modeled as your signal in series with a capacitor. Like the pickups on a Strat, each head generates slightly different harmonic content that is not quite identical for amplitude and phase. If all three heads put out the same signal, then a one head pickup would sound as good as a three head version... Each head sees the other heads as a load for those harmonics which are not identical in amplitude and phase which causes some odd cancellations more apparent at higher frequencies where the difference between heads can be significant. A dominant time constant that makes those head loads look trivial compared to the amp input is the simple solution and that is why K&K specs a load in the 1M range. Too low a load, and then the series capacitance of each head becomes a pass band time constant and you loose bass response.]