The science of reverb springs

[Don Tillman]

   Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1999 01:17:52 -0800 (PST)
   From: Ethan Duni <eduni at ucsd.edu>

   -wellll... to be proper, some amount of the energy is absorbed by that
   microphonic element at the end, or you wouldn't get any signal out, and the
   rest is reflected.. if you had a perfect spring and a perfect microphone,
   you could transfer ALL of the energy into the microphone and have NO
   reflections, but of course this wouldn't make a very good reverb..

Um... not quite right.  

It's not a "microphonic element", it's more like a guitar pickup; a
magnet and a coil of wire sense the movement of the end of the spring.

The pickup will produce an output signal voltage even when it's not
loaded, and if you use a sufficiently high impedance amp stage, you'll
have no energy lost.  (Or so little that you'd need some mighty
expensive equipment to detect it.)

  -- Don