12/16/2024
A “not bad at all” description of how high impedance and low impedance signal chains work. A transformer as a gear ratio is kinda spiffy-neato-cool.
Sometimes, vintage effects that were originally designed to be operated at instrument level are useful in workflows
In order for them to perform their best, we use various devices to help interface their high-impedance (“Hi Z” or “instrument level”) inputs and outputs with our low-impedance (“Lo Z” or “line level”) signals
Impedance is sometimes a tricky concept for creative people to get their minds around—partly because it’s usually explained using arcane technical language
But a pretty useful and straightforward analogy is mechanical gearing
If you’ve ever shifted gears in a bicycle (or a car with a manual transmission), you know that some gears are better at moving from a stop (which requires torque) while others allow higher speed
On a bike, staying in the low “getting started” gear will severely limit how fast you can go, while trying to start in the high “going fast” gear will require inordinate leg strength just to get moving in the first place
By starting in the high-torque gear and then progressively shifting to the high-speed gear, you can optimize for what is needed at any moment
In electronics, “voltage” and “current” (instead of torque and speed) are the two factors being traded-off. “High impedance” effectively means lower current but higher voltage, while “low impedance” means the opposite
So a device (often but not always a transformer) that shifts from one impedance to the other is very much the electronic version of “shifting gears”!
