Latest / The Steve Stine Podcast / Does Going Wireless Change Your Guitar Tone? | CFG SonikSphere NEO

Transcript

Does Going Wireless Change Your Guitar Tone? | CFG SonikSphere NEO · The Steve Stine Podcast

• 0:35
  Steve: All right, today what I want to do is talk to you a little bit about the Sonic Sphere Neal Wireless System from CFG.
• 0:41
  Steve: And I want to just prep it by talking about the simplicity of what you can do and some things that you can do to make sure that you don't damage the unit.
• 0:48
  Steve: And then what we're going to do is we're going to move it and we're going to actually listen to how it sounds versus a cable and see if we can if we can hear some differences there.
• 0:56
  Steve: So this is what I almost missed, as most people I don't really meet read the manual, and thank goodness I did on this.
• 1:02
  Steve: So the first thing I wanted to explain to you about this is that if you read the first page, it says power only, use a standard five volt one amp, five watt max USB power source.
• 1:14
  Steve: Using high voltage fast charges can fry the batteries.
• 1:19
  Steve: So if you're like me and you've got, you know, you know, new phones or whatever it might be, and you're using those high-speed chargers, you don't want to use that with this.
• 1:27
  Steve: Very important.
• 1:29
  Steve: Okay.
• 1:29
  Steve: So they do give you a cable.
• 1:31
  Steve: I've got another, I've got my phone here that I'm uh recording video with too, but they give you a cable here that has, you know, a dual end on one side and a mono or a single end on the other side.
• 1:42
  Steve: And uh it works great.
• 1:43
  Steve: So that's you know, it goes into the case, which I don't even know where my case is.
• 1:49
  Steve: Yeah, I'm not sure what I do with my case, but it comes with a case and you you can just keep it in there and and you're good to go.
• 1:55
  Steve: Um but you don't want to use those chargers.
• 1:58
  Steve: It would suck if you went out and bought this thing, which it isn't you know overly expensive, which is awesome too, but you don't want to fry the battery in it because you didn't read that.
• 2:07
  Steve: So make sure you know that.
• 2:08
  Steve: The next thing I want to do is just show you how this works.
• 2:10
  Steve: So they're super simple, okay?
• 2:13
  Steve: Flips out, plug it into your amp, plug it into your guitar, or plug it into your pedal, your your first pedal in the chain, and then plug it into your guitar, and you're ready to go.
• 2:22
  Steve: So there's a transmitter and a receiver.
• 2:24
  Steve: So we turn them on, and as soon as we turn them on, we see they've got they synchronize to the same color.
• 2:30
  Steve: Okay.
• 2:31
  Steve: So now they're on the same channel.
• 2:33
  Steve: So if you wanted to change the channel, all you need to do is on the transmitter, okay, you just hit the button and they both change the color.
• 2:43
  Steve: You see?
• 2:44
  Steve: That's all you do to change the channel.
• 2:45
  Steve: It's super easy.
• 2:47
  Steve: There's there's nothing to it.
• 2:49
  Steve: The other thing that's really cool about this is that it has a 10 dB pad built in.
• 2:55
  Steve: So if you've got a particular guitar that's hotter, you know, the pickups are hotter than another one, or maybe you use active pickups like I do, which is the reason why I got this in the first place, is I use a lot of EMG pickups in most of my guitars.
• 3:08
  Steve: And with wirelesses, traditionally, they don't play well with active pickups.
• 3:13
  Steve: So they cut out or they don't work at all, you know, different kinds of things like that.
• 3:17
  Steve: And then sometimes there's there's nothing you can do about it.
• 3:19
  Steve: Sometimes you can buy like, you know, a particular cable or something that, you know, there's a there's little workarounds that you can sometimes do, but these work right out of the box with active pickups, which is why I got them.
• 3:29
  Steve: Okay.
• 3:30
  Steve: But in the process, you might find that you're overdriving your signal a little bit running into this wireless system.
• 3:37
  Steve: So what you can do is you can just hold this on the transmitter, you hold this instead of you know switching the channels, which you can do, obviously.
• 3:45
  Steve: Okay, but you can hold this for a couple of seconds, and then what happens is there's a blue light that comes on on both of them that shows it's in the 10 dB pad setting.
• 3:56
  Steve: And if you want to turn it off, you just hold that again and it turns off.
• 4:00
  Steve: So there's nothing to it, it's super simple.
• 4:03
  Steve: These fit into any standard size, you know, input jack.
• 4:06
  Steve: I use a lot of Ibenz gems, and if you know anything about those, um they're kind of awkward, they come in at an angle like this, which is a little bit different.
• 4:14
  Steve: They work just fine in there too.
• 4:15
  Steve: So that's what I like about them.
• 4:17
  Steve: So I just wanted to point those couple things out that they're very easy to use, they're very simple to sync to each other.
• 4:23
  Steve: They've got the 10 dB pad, but also knowing that when you do get it, don't plug it into a high-speed charger.
• 4:30
  Steve: The second thing I guess I could tell you on here, which is kind of important, is it says battery love.
• 4:35
  Steve: Lithium batteries hate being totally empty.
• 4:38
  Steve: Charge them every couple of months if you aren't using them regularly.
• 4:41
  Steve: So, just another tip that's really all I found out of there that you really need to be aware of, um, other than the obvious, you know, you know, don't put them in the pool or something like that.
• 4:51
  Steve: Um, but the rest of it is pretty straightforward.
• 4:53
  Steve: So they're very easy.
• 4:54
  Steve: So the next thing I want to do is I just want to compare these against using a cable so we can decide how it sounds using the wireless versus using a cable.
• 5:04
  Steve: And we'll do that on a clean channel, we'll do it on a crunch channel, and we'll do it on a high gain channel and see what we've got there.
• 5:11
  Steve: And then eventually I'm gonna make a video too of just how they sound moving around the distance that we can go with these as well, but I'll do that when I'm when I'm doing a live show.
• 5:20
  Steve: Um anyway, we'll start there.
• 5:23
  Steve: All right, so next up, what we're gonna do is we're gonna check the cabled tone versus the wireless tone.
• 5:28
  Steve: Right now I've got a cable plugged in, okay?
• 5:31
  Steve: So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna show you what my three channels sound like standard.
• 5:36
  Steve: I'm not gonna change anything about my settings, I'm just gonna go clean.
• 5:45
  Steve: Just do some standard strummy stuff.
• 5:49
  Steve: So that's what my clean would sound like with the cable.
• 6:02
  Steve: Okay, and here is with the wireless unit in.
• 6:05
  Steve: So I'm just gonna start with a clean.
• 6:09
  Steve: Now I don't have the 10 dB uh cut on, it's just just standard right now.
• 6:30
  Steve: With a cable, this is my crunch channel.
• 6:49
  Steve: Okay.
• 6:50
  Steve: Okay, and here's the crunch channel.
• 7:10
  Steve: And here's my high gain channel.
• 7:16
  Steve: Again, using the cable.
• 7:36
  Steve: And here's the high game channel.
• 8:00
  Steve: So that shows us the similarities and or differences between the tones.
• 8:05
  Steve: Um, now I have used this a couple of times live so far.
• 8:08
  Steve: I didn't get any footage of that, unfortunately, but um I will on the next show that I'm playing.
• 8:13
  Steve: Um, so you can see what it looks like and and how it works on stage, that sort of thing.
• 8:17
  Steve: But I'm just telling you, it's a really, really great inexpensive unit.
• 8:21
  Steve: It's very reliable, it's very easy to use.
• 8:24
  Steve: So if you are looking for a wireless unit and um, you know, you have pickups of different dynamic range or active versus pack of passive pickups, that sort of thing, this is just a really great, um, easy, inexpensive wireless system.