Kanilea Active Pickup in Aldrine Model is INCREDIBLY NOISY: Watch this Video.

experimentjon

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TL;DR?: Just watch the video.

EDIT: See Post #77 for update...and another fun video!


I just picked up an Analysis Plus Yellow Oval cable today and tried it out on my Kanilea Aldrine Model. Prior to this, I had only plugged the uke into my Roland Cube 30 electric guitar amp through a $10 Hosa cable for about 30 seconds, just to test that it worked. It worked. No further questions since I don't really play plugged in often anyway. Embarrassingly, this is basically how I test all of my ukes with pickups...through a noisy guitar amp (often still on the guitar British amp model settings) with a cheap guitar cable.

So today, eager to try my new AP cable (much hyped by Jake Shimabukuro), I bought out my proper Roland AC60 Acoustic amp. Here's the full setup:
Kanilea AG Tenor with Kanilea's in-house active pickup. Only modifications: D'Addario T2 strings & Martin Ebony/Abalone bridge pins.
Analysis Plus Yellow Oval 10ft, Angle 1/4" (silent) to Straight 1/4" (silent)
Roland AC60 Amp

I took a quick video on my phone to summarize what happens.... (Click the picture below to watch the video.)



SPOILER BELOW




































THIS UKULELE PLAYS FM 97.5 HAWAII'S COUNTRY RADIO NON STOP.

Here's a quick Q&A:

What Pickup is in the Aldrine Model?
The Kanilea active pickup (often marketed under the name "Pegpals") is installed in the Aldrine model. In his video introducing the ukulele, he says "I think the pickup itself is like $500 bucks." That's not exactly accurate, and I think Kanilea charges somewhere in the ~$200 range for it...which is not cheap...but not quite $500.

So what is really inside? I took a look, and it turns out they are actually just using some undersaddle transducer wired to an Artec EPP active preamp. And I suspect this is the problem. It is a relatively inexpensive kit that can be found on Aliexpress (Chinese Amazon-like site) for $33. I suspect the total cost of parts is under $40. <LINK>

How do you know the Kanilea pickup is the problem?
Like any science experiement, I also ran a few control scenarios to test my hypothesis that the Kanilea pickup is the problem:
Amp nothing plugged in: no noise
Amp with cable plugged in; no ukulele: no noise
Then I tried different instruments
Kanilea Slothead Tenor w/ Fishman Matrix Infinity: beautiful silent tone
Kanilea K-4 Custom Tenor w/ Pegpals Pickup: LOT of noise...but no country music (you can't really tell from the cell-phone video, but it's one of the nosiest pickups I have ever heard...well second noisiest.)
KoAloha Sceptre Tenor w/ Fishman Matrix Infinity: beautiful silent tone
KoAloha Pineapple Sunday w/ Fishman Matrix Infinity: beautiful silent tone
Aldrine Model through cheap cable: country music albeit with a worse signal...guess I wasn't paying attention during my original test.
I think that's enough evidence to isolate the problem to the Kanilea in-house pickup.

Is it just that spot in the room?
No. I can move around and it will only get worse--or better, depending on how you look at it, because the signal actually gets clearer right in about the center of the room. Lifting it off the bed just makes the instrument a better antenna.

Can you change the station?
No; the Gilbert tuners do not allow me to change stations. Fail.

Where did you buy your Kanileas?
The offending instruments with the Kanilea pickup were purchased on the secondary market in like-new condition from the Marketplace here (Aldrine Model) and Craigslist (Custom K4). But I don't think buying on the secondary market caused these fundamental pickup problems. It is EXTREMELY unlikely that the previous owners did anything to the pickup; both were upstanding individuals. I'm no expert and don't want to make any unfounded accusations, but I suspect that the real reason is much more likely to be cheap parts and poor shielding in the pickup.

Is the Analysis Plus cable actually that much better than the cheaper cables?
Here's the thing, at roughly $12.50 per foot, The AP had better be a good cable. And it does NOT disappoint. You can immediately hear the improved clarity and tone. But one very easy way to tell is that the AP transmits the radio signal much more clearly from the ukulele to the amp than the cheap cable.

Have you talked to Kanilea about this yet?
I'm going to go to the annual Ukulele Festival next weekend and try to see Joe and Kristen about this and will post any update.

I welcome your thoughts and any explanations for why my ukulele now plays Taylor Swift, Florida Georgia Line, and The Band Perry--vocals and all.
 
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If you want to sell- I might be game. Not living in Hawaii, I don't think I will receive 97.5 FM. ;)

You were so happy to pick up this uke a few months ago. Do I recall you calling it "fate" or maybe that was how I recall reading it... in any event, I hope a good solution works out for you- whether it is a fix or selling it.
 
If you want to sell- I might be game. Not living in Hawaii, I don't think I will receive 97.5 FM. ;)

You were so happy to pick up this uke a few months ago. Do I recall you calling it "fate" or maybe that was how I recall reading it... in any event, I hope a good solution works out for you- whether it is a fix or selling it.

Oh yes the ukulele is fantastic--most of the time the pickup issue won't bother me, so I'm not looking to sell. It's purely a pickup problem. But I have two Kanileas with this pickup and they both have problems--to varying degrees. I'm really wondering if this is an anomaly, or if it's a more widespread problem with their in-house active pickup. And if that is the case, I would advise that anyone considering it just go for the Fishman or other 3rd party pickup until Kanilea irons out these pickup issues.
 
Even by internet "science" standards, you cannot rule out that your Kanilea pickups are faulty, with a sample size of 2.

That being said, I think it is disappointing that the highly praised "Kanilea" pickup is just a cheap generic pickup.
 
just saw your video, all I can say is wth. that's not good. I will also be attending the uke fest next week :),I would like to know why a collector model kanilea has a cheap $44 pickup.
 
Even by internet "science" standards, you cannot rule out that your Kanilea pickups are faulty, with a sample size of 2.

That being said, I think it is disappointing that the highly praised "Kanilea" pickup is just a cheap generic pickup.

Hmm, that is a little disappointing. When I ordered my Kanilea Island Inlay tenor I could choose from a few pickup options since HMS delivered my uke to Kanilea for the install, and Kristen encouraged me to go with this one. Since they used it in some of their high end ukes, I went with it. I have never had a problem but my cables and amp are super cheap so I would never know the difference anyway.

I hope you get everything resolved keep us posted.
 
*I just viewed the video*

WOW I thought you were joking about the radio part.
This is amazing!!@#?

It's like an extra special feature only available on the limited edition ukes.
Play along with your favourite radio station!
 
Wow, that is very disappointing John, and puzzling. Too bad the tuners don't allow you to change the station. I'm not a big fan of country music.

See what Joe says about it, but why not just switch it out for another Fishman that you like and have had good results with?
 
I think imma need to plug mine in too. I don't mind country so this may be a good thing. I can play along to the songs. :)
 
How come you don't want to contact Joe now or go by the shop this week..
they might not have an amp to plug into at the festival...
unless you go on stage...haha
 
Whoa that's really weird. It's definitely the pickup, but that puzzles me cause I have four ukes with this pickup installed and also use AP cables. None of them have ever showed this problem. I would call Joe and Kristen right away and inform them of this but I think they're at summer NAMM. I'll see if I can get a hold of them and point to this thread as soon as possible. Thanks for bringing this to my attention Jon!
 
Yeah...That Aldrine model especially I'd have to say that's definitely a defective pickup / preamp problem and probably not characteristic of the species. That might be why they were on the secondary market though it seems like the original owners would have had them fixed under warranty...

The Aldrine model, especially, sounds like there may be a bad ground between the pickup and the preamp...

The other one, at least from what I could tell from that video, might just be a combination of a not especially premium system and pretty high gain (in the internal preamp). Also, I'd check the battery - some onboard systems get both a lower audio level and a higher noise level as the battery level drops (I prefer these systems over the ones that work fine until they suddenly drop into completely unusable distortion, though...) You got almost no string/body sound when you plugged into the non-Aldrine Kanilea so I'd immediately suspect a low battery.

Piezo transducers are noise disasters waiting to happen, unfortunately, because they are that devil's soup of extremely high impedance and very low signal - i.e. noise factories. That's why you almost always see an internal preamp with them, because you want to get the signal to noise level up before the long cable run from the instrument to the amp. The better systems, designed by people who know what they are about, can be fine but if you have the slightest problem with grounding or shielding they can get noisy in a New York minute.

John
 
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How come you don't want to contact Joe now or go by the shop this week..
they might not have an amp to plug into at the festival...
unless you go on stage...haha

I don't have any intention of badmouthing the company if that's what you're getting at. It was Saturday, so they weren't open anyway, and I've got a full time job, so something this minor isn't going to induce me to take time off to make the drive down to Kailua. I'm in no rush to fix it since ukulele is just a hobby for me anyway, so I don't quite need my gear to work 100% of the time. I'll see them when I have a chance next weekend.

Whoa that's really weird. It's definitely the pickup, but that puzzles me cause I have four ukes with this pickup installed and also use AP cables. None of them have ever showed this problem. I would call Joe and Kristen right away and inform them of this but I think they're at summer NAMM. I'll see if I can get a hold of them and point to this thread as soon as possible. Thanks for bringing this to my attention Jon!

Aldrine, you get all the good stuff! But with your ukes and Stacy's included in the sample size, it looks like mine might just be a lemon, and the faults are probably not representative of their pickup line as a whole.

Although it is surprising that they'd use the relatively inexpensive Artec EPP components in there...guy, telling the world about your $500 pickup. jkjk.

Yeah...That Aldrine model especially I'd have to say that's definitely a defective pickup / preamp problem and probably not characteristic of the species. That might be why they were on the secondary market though it seems like the original owners would have had them fixed under warranty...

The Aldrine model, especially, sounds like there may be a bad ground between the pickup and the preamp...

The other one, at least from what I could tell from that video, might just be a combination of a not especially premium system and pretty high gain (in the internal preamp). Also, I'd check the battery - some onboard systems get both a lower audio level and a higher noise level as the battery level drops (I prefer these systems over the ones that work fine until they suddenly drop into completely unusable distortion, though...) You got almost no string/body sound when you plugged into the non-Aldrine Kanilea so I'd immediately suspect a low battery.

Piezo transducers are noise disasters waiting to happen, unfortunately, because they are that devil's soup of extremely high impedance and very low signal - i.e. noise factories. That's why you almost always see an internal preamp with them, because you want to get the signal to noise level up before the long cable run from the instrument to the amp. The better systems, designed by people who know what they are about, can be fine but if you have the slightest problem with grounding or shielding they can get noisy in a New York minute.

John

Good tip. I'll put in a fresh battery in the K4 and see if that fixes the noise problem. If you're right, that's likely the source of that problem.

As for the original owners getting it fixed under warranty (I'm the 3rd owner of the AG), with how little it was played before me, I highly doubt they even knew about the problem. (Heck, I've had the uke for a few months now, wrote effusive praise about it, and didn't even find out the problem until I actually plugged it in through a good cable and good amp and paid attention.) The former owners were probably hobbyists like me who like ukuleles, but don't have a lot of time for it.

I'll take the AG model apart today and see if I can find a bad ground or anything that might help to resolve the problem quickly.
 
Hmm, that is a little disappointing. When I ordered my Kanilea Island Inlay tenor I could choose from a few pickup options since HMS delivered my uke to Kanilea for the install, and Kristen encouraged me to go with this one. Since they used it in some of their high end ukes, I went with it. I have never had a problem but my cables and amp are super cheap so I would never know the difference anyway.

I hope you get everything resolved keep us posted.

Markup. :p

Actually, acoustically, there's a big difference between my ukes with the bulky Fishman pickup (I have 2 Kanilea tenors with those) and the two ukes I have with the Artec EPP. The volume inside the instrument changes dramatically. The weight changes as well--although I find the weight of the Fishman-equipped instruments to be more well balanced--add a fat Analysis Plus cable w/ overmold plugs to the endpin and it gets even better-balanced in terms of weight. However, my favorite pickup of all time was a Fishman Acoustic Matrix II (no onboard controls) that I had in a Taylor 812C. It was very similar to the Artec--light, slim, plug and go; no tone/volume to play with b/c you could do that through the amp/DI/soundboard. I think Aldrine also used that Fishman Matrix II, which is probably why he is using the Artec now that the Fishman is discontinued.
 
Update.

Tried the new battery on the K-4 as OldePhart suggested. No dice. But I did discover something shocking. I thought that it was simply noise in the pickup (inaudible in the video) but definitely noticeable in person. Turns out it was not noise--but static...like the type you get when you're trying to tune to a radio station in one of those old-school alarm radios with analog AM/FM dials. And when I stand in just the right position with the uke over my head near the corner of the room (no joke), I can actually hear radio music amidst the scramble. That said, for a second, I thought the battery had fixed the problem b/c I couldn't hear noise in the spot where I was working...then I moved and it came back...unfortunate....

I went ahead and opened up the AG model to see if there was a simple fix. There was none that I could see. Here are some pics for those who want to see what the pickup actually looks like. (The pickup in the K4 Custom looks exactly the same...so it's not like the previous owner of the AG stole the good pickup and put in the Artec. If you have a Kanilea with their in-house pickup, and have a wrench, I encourage you to take yours apart too--it's a relatively simple procedure.)


All the parts: Note there are 2 key assemblies:1
1) The UST assembly which sends the sound out of a 3.5mm mono plug that fits into a receiver in the Artec.
2) The active Artec EndPin Preamp (EPP) which is basically just wired to the battery and takes a mono audio input
The chopstick in the background is used to help put everything back together. Funny aside, at first, I grabbed a chopstick from a pair that we don't eat with, thinking it was a cheap set until my mom stopped me...nope; pre-ban elephant ivory.... So I found a disposable wooden one.


Here you can see the Artec branding. The metal sleeve unscrews to reveal the innards--note that the sleeve does not screw all the way to the bottom of the threads.


You can see where the mono plug from the UST goes into the EPP.


Soldering looks fine.

So after taking it all apart, I learned that the problem rests solely on the Artec assembly. Today, it seemed that the radio signal wasn't as bad as yesterday, but after taking it apart, I could walk around with just the EPP part of the assembly (no battery, no UST attached) plugged into the amp and catch the radio. The station was still 97.5 country. Adding the battery seemed to make the signal stronger though.

So there we have it. The problem in my instruments is almost certainly the Artec EPP (Kanilea's "PegPals pickup). While it isn't damning for all Kanilea instruments equipped with their in-house pickup, I would certainly be wary of selecting that option if I were buying another from the factory given that they will install the Fishman Matrix Infinity for just a small premium to their in-house option. IIRC, the Fishman option was ~$250 installed vs ~$200 for the Artec. That's roughly $150 in parts vs $40 in parts, respectively. You can do your own math for the implied installation costs/markup.

I'm sure Joe and Kristen wouldn't knowingly ship out product that was defective. And this thread is in not intended to be a pot shot at Kanilea. The ukuleles are beautiful. My first "high end" ukulele was a Kanilea K1, so I do like the brand. But when they outsource the pickup to a generic brand and put their own name on it, it's not a LR Baggs, MiSi, or Fishman problem--it becomes a Kanilea problem.

So, I am not the first owner of these instruments, and don't expect Kanilea to fix this under their warranty. I just wanted to share my experience so that if you were considering this pickup, you could make a more-educated decision. I'm just a single data point. Aldrine is another--and he has toured worldwide with this Kanilea pickup.
 
Interesting. I'm not really a big fan of using a mini plug & jack to connect a piezo to the preamp. I know it's convenient, but that is the only thing it has going for it. That whole circuit is very high impedance and a plug/jack are just another fail point, IMO. I worked in electronics in the military for twelve years before going into software and I've stayed pretty active in electronics since building tube guitar amps, etc. I've seen corrosion, fungus, even cigarette smoke build up and insert enough resistance on the ground circuit to cause various problems.

Tube guitar amps without grid stopper resistors on the first gain stage are notorious for receiving radio broadcasts when a transmitter is nearby. I was going to say that was obviously not the problem here (there are obviously no tubes in that endpin preamp) but then I thought about something - I bet it's a JFET preamp and unlike bipolar transistors JFETs work on much the same principle as tubes. In fact, a correctly biased JFET stage followed with suitable filtering makes a not-too-terrible poor-man's overdrive circuit. I'd have to dig out the theory books that I haven't looked at in ages, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if something similar to a grid-stopper circuit is recommended on a high-gain JFET circuit...

John
 
It might be worth it to try plugging the amp into an outlet that's on a different circuit, or try "lifting the ground" with a 2 prong adapter to see if that makes any difference. I guess it could be possible that there is some serious ground loop stuff going on that could be external to the pickup. Probably not but worth checking out.
 
It might be worth it to try plugging the amp into an outlet that's on a different circuit, or try "lifting the ground" with a 2 prong adapter to see if that makes any difference. I guess it could be possible that there is some serious ground loop stuff going on that could be external to the pickup. Probably not but worth checking out.

Thanks for the tip. Just tried that too...well indirectly. I was too lazy to find another outlet, so I just went back to my Roland Cube 30/Hosa setup which is plugged into a different power strip and a different wall outlet. Still have country radio. But due to a combination of the JC Clean model on the amp, the speaker design, and the less expensive cable, the radio/static is much more faint, and only annoying in a few parts of the room...which is probably why I didn't notice it in my initial slipshod function test since the radio signal is especially weak where I usually sit, and isn't too prominent with volume set to 25% which is usually have the amp set at. With that, I think we can rule out the amp or the cable being the culprit. All eyes on the Kanilea-branded Pickup.
 
Thats a heck of a fancy radio though xD expensive too!
 
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