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Old 05-04-2015, 04:57 PM
musiclover7 musiclover7 is offline
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Default Zoom A3 - My thoughts after 2 months with it.

I have been playing around with the A3 for a few months now. I just finished playing a series of shows with it concluding this past weekend. I felt it was time to weigh in with a review. I hope this helps anyone out there who may be considering buying this unit. I bought it and own it, partly because I really like my Zoom G5 which I use in my electric rig, but mostly because it really suits my purposes when I play out live acoustically. I play 3 instruments live (Nylon Guitar, Godin Acoustic guitar with high tension strings tuned Baritone (E is C), and ukulele) in my acoustic act, and changing instruments has always been a PITA up to now. The zoom will allow me to plug both my Nylon and my Godin into it, and it will even provide Phantom power to my Godin as well. This was the driving reason that I bought this thing. I think, for 200 bucks, this thing serves as a very, very quiet DI with built in Phantom power, feedback killer, and volume booster. The effects in the unit are for me.. secondary.. a happy addition that enables me to further enhance my sound.

Sonically speaking, this thing is very low noise, very quiet. As with the G5, I can hear a very subtle difference between the way my acoustic guitar sounds when plugged directly into my Fishman amp, and the way it sounds when the A3 sits in between with all tone altering settings off. That said, the difference is very, very subtle. It is so subtle, it is barely worth mentioning. It is so subtle, that I would almost say they may have achieved true bypass, but not quite. Anyways, when you wet up your sound with this unit, which is done via the Mix nob, and engage just it’s modeling features, your tone will change a bit more. From what I hear, it sounds like my tone flattens and crispens just a bit, and then gets eq’d a bit. Changing the model type is like changing to a preset EQ, with more built in crips/flat or less. The modeling really does not do anything very drastic to your sound. On a potential bad note, some of the air that I was previously getting through my built in Fishman pickup seems to go away when it’s engaged. Again, this is all real subtle, and I doubt I could make a video with the kind of camera’s I own that would illuminate this for youtube. Also, on the one hand, I rather like what it does to my sound... at least for some applications. If anything, it sounds a bit cleaner/crisper, and more level, maybe even slightly compressed. On the other, a minute amount of the ambient noise in my guitar is no longer there… After 2.5 months, I can’t decide if I truly like it. I do at times, and I don't at others... That’s the modeling piece though… You can enable/disable at your leisure.

Also worth mentioning here that there are 2 volume nobs on this thing, one for Mic, and one for Pickup, yet unfortunately you cannot truly turn these nobs all the way to Zero. That’s right, there is no way to completely mute the sound of one or the other. Even all the way down, if you pluck a string, you will hear some noise coming out of your mains. Not even close to enough to generate a feedback loop or anything, but it's there. This is not a deal breaker, but it’s a bit of a bummer for someone like me who bought this unit mainly to switch back and forth between instruments.

As others have said, this is not a unit that you will want to fuss with much live. It is also not a unit that will give you 5-10 different sounds you can use when playing live. It will, but switching between them would be a PITA, so it's not really worth considering. I think it functions best for the acoustic player who is looking for maybe 1-2 alternative tones to add to his/her bag of tricks that he/she can polish up at home well before gig time. I will also say, that I don't like the effects this unit offers as much as I like the effects in the Zoom G5. Most of the effects appear to be identical to the ones in the Zoom G5 (same name, same pic, etc) which I also own, with a few noobies, but they don't sound as great imo. There is probably a different processor working behind the scene, but what do I know? The reverbs for instance, are not as rich and convincing as I would like them to be, and I generally wind up using the reverb built into my Fishman amp instead, which works out well, as the A3 will only let you use 2 effects at a time in any case and I'm glad one of them does not need to be verb. Example: HD Reverb on this unit has a tin sound on the top that sounds very digital where-as HD Reverb on the G5 on the other hand has none of that. HD Hall Reverb, Mod Reverb, and Arena Reverb were all pretty good sounding verbs and would be my choice if I wanted to get reverb out of this thing. The Chorus's are pretty convincing as are the Compressors, which is where I have spent most of my time. I don't really like Chorus all that much as an effect generally, but I have found some scaled back chorus tones with this thing that I do enjoy. The Compressors are ok, and they are nice to engage for leads, etc. A lot of the effects require significant tweaking to get them where you might want them, but they are good enough, that you can dial in a tone to your liking, again, well ahead of gig time.


This is a 3 footswitch pedal, with 1 pedal dedicated to your effects, the other two to feedback kill and volume boost. Switching between effects is done round robin style, which is the reason you won't want to have 15 different effects/sounds dialed into this thing. You can have 40 odd presets stored in the unit which is plenty, and then you can assign letters to them to add them to your live rotation. Playing live then, with the effect button, you can go from A to B to C to D and so on until at the end you come back to A by pressing the switch over and over. This approach works fine for me. If you really wanted to obsess on your sound, you could program a different tone for each of your songs and work that way, but I doubt there are many who would want to. I find myself using it a bit differently. So far I have 3 different total sounds I am liking. I switch the mode when in them, and in one, when I press the effect, it engages/disengages just the compressor. In another, it turns on just the delay. It is not the best design from a flexibility standpoint, and yeah, it would have been much better had they given us the ability to plug in an optional footswitch with 3 nobs on it to turn effects off in a channel individually while still using the master button to change banks. Yes, this would have been ideal... Still, if you just stay focused on the goal of mainly finding 2-3 more tones to add to your live bag of tricks, this unit does fit the bill.

The Volume booster works well and is a welcome addition. It does what it says, and allows you to come up in sound and alter your tone a bit to cut through mix for solos. The feedback killer also works very well as a search and destroy feedback killer. I use it and am shocked how well it works. The first press kills feedback with minimal tone sacrifice. The 2nd hit though really fracks yer tone, but maybe that's just my guitar. Maybe others will perform differently. I have had the best success pressing it just once when needed, and then reaching down and manually shrinking the scoop on whatever frequency it centered on. This provides minimal change to overall sound, while still eliminating annoying hum/feedback. In the end, this is a seriously cool feature for an acoustic player, and not many DI's out there have it that I am aware of.

Unlike others, I had an easy time learning how to use the A3, and barely had to spend any time in the manual. It packs a lot of feature into a relatively small device, so I can understand others finding it confusing. In my opinion, it is pretty dang straightforward. You have your inputs and your outputs, built in eq and volumes. Effect editing is pretty straightforward once you get a few things down. The effect nob on the unit serves as a back button and the effect footswitch turns effects on and off when you are in edit mode. The effect footswitch will only change effect banks when you are fully out of edit mode. It's really pretty easy to use.

I recommend this unit, though again, think of it as a really nice DI with perks, rather than as an acoustic multi-effect pedal. As a DI for 200 bucks, it is hard to beat, especially if you are musician who plays more than just 1 instrument on stage like me. Even if you play just one instrument, the ability to blend a live mic into your direct sound is a well thought and potentially very awesome sound enhancing addition. I can’t comment on how well this unit works in that capacity cuz I have yet to try it out, but based on what I have seen on youtube, it is killer. If you just play one axe, blending a mic in with your built in pickup will likely do wonders for your tone.

I read elsewhere on the net that some folks prefer the A2 to this unit. I personally have never heard the A2 to compare, so I cannot comment. I can say, I am for the most part very happy with my A3 purchase. I wish the effects were as rich and convincing as they are in my Zoom G5, and I wish the modeling could be bypassed to provide access to a 3rd effect. Overall though, this is a very nice Acoustic DI.. with great perks.

Last edited by musiclover7; 05-04-2015 at 05:20 PM.
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  #2  
Old 05-04-2015, 08:17 PM
RockerDuck RockerDuck is offline
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On another thread I posted that you can plug a mic and guitar in at the same time and use it as a two channel mixer. Sing and play through the A3. Good for people to know in a pinch or small gig.
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Old 05-04-2015, 11:51 PM
musiclover7 musiclover7 is offline
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Yes.. Very true. If you only have one input on your amp, this device will allow you to blend to signals together into one nicely.
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Old 05-05-2015, 06:53 AM
Doubleneck Doubleneck is offline
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Thanks for your well thought out review.
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  #5  
Old 05-09-2015, 11:38 AM
Photojeep Photojeep is offline
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Great review! I've owned an A3 for a couple years and just used it out for the first time last Thursday. I have it on my pedalboard amongst a few other pedals and have only used it at home for practicing. Every other time I've played at my church, I've simple plugged into my DI and out to the house; no pedalboard involved. Because I was swapping between two guitars and my board has an A/B switch, I had to use it and my A3 come along for the ride.

I'm glad I did this because while I had always loved the A3 and what it has to offer, it had also seemed the modeling was very subtle. Much to my surprise, I found the modeling to be much more noticeable when I played in a large room. I'm no sound engineer but it seems the size of the room affects the modeling as well. I can't say I understand it but I liked what I heard.

Anyway, great review.

PJ
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Old 10-13-2016, 09:16 AM
Hugo Elizalde Hugo Elizalde is offline
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Hi,
Thanks a lot for a thoughtful review of the Zoom A3. I would appreciate some feedback on the following issue:

The A3 manual mentions the following: "Effect processing capacity: The allows you to combine 3 effects as you like. However, if you combine effect types that require great amounts of processing power, the available processing capacity might not be enough. If the processing required for an effect exceeds the available capacity, the effect is bypassed and a ”DSP Full!” message appears. This can be avoided by changing 1 or more of the effect types or setting them to THRU."

That warning sounds a bit disturbing. I wouldn't mind if the A3 crashes under unrealistic settings such as a 10sec-decay "HD Reverb" plus a 4000msec "Delay" with infinite repetitions. But I would expect the A3 to perfectly handle a typical setting for a nylon guitar, which is a touch of "HD Reverb" (say, 3sec decay time) plus a hint of "Delay" (say, 500ms delay time with 3 or 4 repetitions). The latter is actually my intended usage and I wonder if this is a feasible scenario to use the A3.

On a side note, I am planning to use the A3 for blending a K&K mini pure classical pickup and a Baggs Lyric mic, both installed on my nylon guitar. Any experience with the A3 and this setup? Thanks.

Can you comment on this please? Thanks a lot in advance
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Old 10-13-2016, 10:20 AM
buzzardwhiskey buzzardwhiskey is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugo Elizalde View Post
Hi,
Thanks a lot for a thoughtful review of the Zoom A3. I would appreciate some feedback on the following issue:

The A3 manual mentions the following: "Effect processing capacity: The allows you to combine 3 effects as you like. However, if you combine effect types that require great amounts of processing power, the available processing capacity might not be enough. If the processing required for an effect exceeds the available capacity, the effect is bypassed and a ”DSP Full!” message appears. This can be avoided by changing 1 or more of the effect types or setting them to THRU."

That warning sounds a bit disturbing. I wouldn't mind if the A3 crashes under unrealistic settings such as a 10sec-decay "HD Reverb" plus a 4000msec "Delay" with infinite repetitions. But I would expect the A3 to perfectly handle a typical setting for a nylon guitar, which is a touch of "HD Reverb" (say, 3sec decay time) plus a hint of "Delay" (say, 500ms delay time with 3 or 4 repetitions). The latter is actually my intended usage and I wonder if this is a feasible scenario to use the A3.

On a side note, I am planning to use the A3 for blending a K&K mini pure classical pickup and a Baggs Lyric mic, both installed on my nylon guitar. Any experience with the A3 and this setup? Thanks.

Can you comment on this please? Thanks a lot in advance
I am using the A3 to combine a magnetic soundhole pickup with a supercardioid dynamic mic. I am using the first two effects (Model on #1, and Parametric EQ on #2). The mic is routed so that it doesn't go through any effects.

This setup works great for me. I turn up the mic's "percentage" until monitor feedback issues occur and then back it off.

The mic input is a combo connector that will accept the Lyric and I see no reason why this wouldn't work well.

As far as the DPS Full message, I haven't run into it but have heard weird anomalies when I was playing around with using all three effects with computation intense settings. My take is that this $200 box has limits that I'm able to work within.
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Old 10-13-2016, 11:22 AM
Irish Pennant Irish Pennant is offline
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For switching instrument by unplugging one and then plugging in another, I activate the built in tuner, it kills the outbound signal, no speaker pop.
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Old 10-13-2016, 11:42 AM
GibbyPrague GibbyPrague is offline
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Is there a one line version ?
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  #10  
Old 10-15-2016, 05:40 PM
daddyvettes daddyvettes is offline
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I've had mine for about 2 years. It does nice things but what I've noticed is that it works greater wonders with guitars that don't sound good alone. With higher quality guitars the enhancement isn't as noticeable because it already sounds good. Just a note.
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Old 10-16-2018, 02:21 AM
p.pan p.pan is offline
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Hi,

I drop the zoom A3 ...and I broke the central switch....
The one you use to select the tuning...

Anyone have an idea where I can find to replace it.

Let me know.
Thanks.
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Old 10-16-2018, 09:51 PM
drakoryn drakoryn is offline
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I'm pretty sure you can find a used one for cheap on ebay/craigslist. In my area, i've seen two listings for around $100-130
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  #13  
Old 10-17-2018, 04:48 AM
p.pan p.pan is offline
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I just want to change the switch.
Exept that the Zoom A3 work nice.

Thanks.
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