Anyone Using Acoustasonic Player Model with Spectrum?

[guitaniac]

I just watched Anderton's vid on the new simplified Fender Acoustasonic Tele Player model today. I found it interesting that one of the available signals is a completely dry Fishman film piezo (Matrix) signal. Since the Acoustasonic models are designed to be good modeling platforms, I'm thinking that dry signal might work well with some of the sound images in the Spectrum. If that's the case, the user would have the extra advantage (over the original and more expensive model) of being able to adjust the wet/dry signal blend. The user would also have the Spectrum's compression and other controls at his/her disposal. At the very least, it would be an interesting experiment.

[jonfields45]

The Player uses a Sonitone coax, not a Matrix as the American one does. I've not looked into those libraries lately to know if the Sonitone is now well covered.

[guitaniac]

Thanks for the info, Jon. The Sonitone is cheaper and easier to install, so it makes sense that they might cut corners there. If its like every Sonitone that I've pulled out of a guitar, they just laid it on a flat saddle-slot floor (as opposed to routing a groove to cradle the pickup).

In any event, the Sonitone would likely be less compatible with the Spectrum.

[guitaniac]

Checking out the Acoustasonic demos, I found that the Jazzmaster model also has a dry piezo signal when on switch position 2, knob position A. The Acoustasonic Jazzmaster is a USA made, higher priced model, so I presume it would have the Matrix UST in it. It would be the Acoustasonic model most likely to work well with the Aura Spectrum.

The Aura technology wasn't originally intended for modeling, but the original Aura manual did have a section describing what kind of guitar would make the best platform for modeling.

They didn't use the "M" word at the time because they were trying hard to establish that Aura sound imaging was a distinctly different thing than modeling. Later on Fishman developed Aura IC ("image casting") and increased their knowledge regarding guitars that make good modeling platforms. Considering that the Acoustasonic models can imitate a broad range of acoustic guitars, they are obviously well designed to be modeling platforms.