Pace - if you can hear me over all this clatter -
What I said was that that single coil pickup is a source of noise inside the circuit. This noise is part of the signal that is going into the preamp.
Any preamp will add some degree of distortion and background noise to the signal, which gives you the S/N ratio of the preamp. A preamp that adds less noise is said to have more headroom, which is just another way of saying it has a better S/N ratio.
If noise is already present in the signal going into the preamp, this noise will be amplified above the noise level of the preamp. This is regardless of the S/N ratio.
By the way, no 18v system is guaranteed to have a better S/N ratio than passive or 9v. Why do you think Alembic can still get by with 9v for the non-Series electronics?
(Message edited by adriaan on November 26, 2007)
