Alex Rice Piezo

Preamplifier

The simplest DIY contact mic is a piezo disc

soldered to a mic cable. The impedance
mismatch creates a high pass filter which
produces the scratchy, honky sound that I’ve
always associated with contact mics. (OK,
maybe the “simplest” contact mic is
homegrown piezoelectric rochelle salt.
Whoa!)

In 2009 I found a link to Alex Rice’s piezo

preamp (www.alexrice.co.uk/content/piezo-
preamp), a phantom-powered preamplifier
that provides a balanced, buffered output
from a lowly piezo disc. It sounds great, but
it’s been offline since sometime in early 2011.
Before the site went down, I did a version in
CadSoft’s Eagle PCB layout software and sent
it to Alex to include on his site. (His original
design was done with Kicad.) Now that his
site seems to be gone forever, I’ve collected
everything here.

Download Alex Rice’s files + my Eagle

version (zip archive)

Alex Rice is responsible for the design. I’m

re-distributing everything in accordance
with his Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0
license. Please read the license file in his
original folder for details.

Differences between my version and Alex

Rice’s original:

My version was done with Eagle, not

Kicad
I used through-hole components on a
small PCB to fit on the back of a 35mm
piezo disc. He used SMD components
to fit into an XLR shell.
NOTE: His site contained a schematic
jpeg which I used to recreate the
preamp design in Eagle. I’ve never
opened the Kicad files, so there may be
differences that I don’t know about.
I’ve built it and it works, though.

Zeppelin Design Labs sells a contact mic kit

called the Cortado based on this circuit (also
available pre-assembled). I don’t have it, but
the schematic is identical to Alex Rice’s
original, the price seems extremely fair, and
the manual and documentation are fantastic.

Stompville in the UK sells a pre-assembled

phantom-powered piezo pre based on an
improved version of this design. There’s a
blog post describing the design process.

Check out mo-seph’s version that uses

surface-mount components. (It fits inside a
bottle cap!)

Greg Perrin drew these beautiful plans for

how to build this circuit on perfboard:

Here is the original text of Alex’s page (no

pictures) courtesy of the Internet Archive’s
Wayback Machine:

Piezo Preamplifier

What does it do?

This is a high impedence phantom powered

balanced preamplifier designed to make piezo
contact microphones sound awesome although
it could be used for any high impedence source
such as guitar pickups. It takes a balanced high
impedence input and produces a balanced low
impedence output with around 20dB of gain
using just 12 components (8 with some
caveats).If you use SMT components it fits inside
a male XLR jack shell using the PCB below.

(schematic image missing)

How do I use it?

XLR 1,2&3 are the outputs and connect to pins 1-

3 of a male XLR plug. Pin 1 is ground the other
two are the ‘hot’ balanced differential outputs.
IN1 and IN2 are the inputs from your high
impedence source, in the case of a piezo
element that’s the two wires connected to it.
GND is the connection for the screen of the cable
that goes to the piezo element. The element itself
should be surrounded by a grounded shield
such as a piece of copper foil. If you are using an
unshielded piezo element then you may prefer
to treat it as a single ended source and ground
one side which will reduce hum pickup but
sacrifice 6dB of gain. The cable to the preamp
should ideally be short or the capacitance of the
cable will start to affect frequency respsonse
although actually I suspect that with it’s
balanced input it will actually work perfectly fine
with cables up to a few metres.

Note from Zach: The balanced piezo

wiring confuses people. Here’s a
clarification:

1. Connect the center of the disc to PZ-

IN1 on the preamp.
2. Connect the brass edge of the disc to
PZ-IN2 on the preamp.
3. Cover the disc with a layer of electrical
tape so no metal is visible.
4. Cover the disc with conductive foil tape
& connect the foil to PZ-GND on the
preamp.

This creates a balanced connection. (Alex

Rice mentions that you can wire it
unbalanced (“single-ended”) if you want,
but I’ve found the increase in noise is
noticeable.

To actually use it plug the XLR plug into a mixing

desk (via an XLR cable) and turn on the phantom
power. Prod the piezo element, you should hear
something. Now go stick it to stuff round the
house and you should hear many things;
strange things.

If you plan on using this for a guitar then 12dB

of gain (you loose 6dB by grounding one side) is
likely to be too much in which case you could
add source resistors (between the source of each
FET and the current source). A pair of 2k
resistors drop the gain to about 6dB, 3k resistors
give 3dB. If you are using a single ended source
like a guitar then tie one input to ground – the
differential amplifier will still give much better
performance than a single fet because it’s
output is balanced so hum rejection should be
excellent.

How does it work?

It’s design is at least slightly novel as far as I

know and is the result of a lot of fiddling around
with circuit simulators and breadboarded
prototypes. The credit for the basic idea of
putting a FET in a plug goes to J. Till.

It’s basicly a standard FET differential amplifier

with a couple of tricks to keep component count
and noise down and input impedence up. It
takes advantage of the fact that phantom power
is fed to the balanced XLR inputs via pair of
closely matched 6.81k resistors. These resistors
are used directly as the drain resitors in the
differential amplifier rather than the more usual
method of connecting an additional pair of
matched resistors to each line to create a +48V
supply rail and then feeding the signal back
through DC blocking capacitors. Since the mixing
desk already blocks DC at it’s inputs it’s not a
problem that the signal is floating at +45V or so.

Q1 and Q2 are differential pair. Q3 is a current

source to improve CMRR by reducing the effect
of Q1-Q2 not being precisely matched, this could
be replaced with a current regulator diode (if
you can source one) or a 22k resistor if you
accept reduced performance (+22dB common
mode noise for 10% matched FETs in theory, in
practise it doesn’t seem to make much
difference). Together with the circuitry in the
mixer they make a differential amplifier. The
gain of the amplifier depends somewhat on the
transconductance of the FETs themselves since it
operates largely without feedback

C2 and C3 are DC blocking capacitors to stop

the piezo element floating at ~25V, if the piezo is
insulated you can dispense with them but they’re
so small that they’re worth it for peace of mind –
if the piezo touches a grounded object it’ll create
a huge bang which may hurt your speakers or
your ears.

R1,R2,R5,R6 are the bias network for the fet

inputs, R5 and R6 feed some of the output back
to the input which increases gain and input
resistance. R5 and R6 linearise the outputs of
the FETs by applying a signal of Vgs/2 to the gate
which both increases gain and reduces
distortion. FETs without feedback mostly
introduce 2nd harmonic distortion, if for some
reason you _want_ this then increase R5 and R6
but if you increase it beyond about 10M you’ll
start to get some HF roll off.

C1 and R4 are a Zobel network to avoid

oscillation in the mic cable. This idea came from
Rod Elliott. If you plan on driving very long
lengths of cable a pair of 220 Ohm resistors in
series with the output would further reduce the
risk of HF oscillations. If you do this they should
be closely matched

Component Selection :

Q1 and Q2 need to be a closely matched pair of

N-channel FETs with an Idss of 1-2mA, a Vbr of
at least 25V and low noise. This can either be a
pair of separate devices (J201, 2N3819 etc.)
matched by hand from a selection of devices or
a single monolithic dual FET (2SK389, LSK389
etc. ). The latter offers significantly better
performance but is more expensive and harder
to source. FET matching can be done according
to various methods, but I’d reccomend one like
this (original link broken. Try this instead)
which matches them by Vgs for a particular Id,
usually 50uA or so

My prototype was built using a pair of 2N3819s

matched rather approximately by Idss to about
1mA and is very quiet using a shielded piezo
element, but will pick up some hum if you touch
the unshielded element, given that the hum
pickup on a human can often be to the order of
several volts thats not really surprising.

The source resistor for the current source needs

to be selected to give the correct quiescent
current. I think that the optimum for most FETs
is about 0.5mA per FET but it’s actually rather
uncritical. More current means more gain and
less noise but reduces the common mode
rejection. Anything between about 0.1mA and
0.5mA per FET is fine. For a J201 this means 500
– 1k, for 2N3819 about 1k – 2k. Since parts with
a lowish Vgs are preferred for the differential
pair you could use the ones with a higher Vgs for
the current source.

Note from Zach: Alex Rice didn’t include a

specific parts list, so here it is:

Q1,Q2, Q3 : 2N3819 or J201 JFET

(I used 2N3819. If you try other FETS, be
aware that they may have different
pinouts.)
R1,R2,R5,R6 : 3 megohm resistors
R3: depends on JFET type and
individual properties: J201 = 500 – 1k,
2N3819 = 1k – 2k
R4: 150 ohm resistor
C1,C2,C3 : 220 picofarad film capacitors
(50v or greater rating)
Foil Tape with conductive adhesive (see
my piezo disc wiring note above)
Male XLR connector
Balanced mic cable (2 conductors +
shield)

Performance :

This is a simulation of the preamp being fed by a

typical piezo element which is represented by a
voltage source in series with a 5nF capacitor,
this is typical of a 15mm piezo disc. The FETs are
matched to about 10%. It’s driving a simulated
15m mic cable. As you can see the common
mode gain (red line) is very low (about -80dB)
and the differential mode gain (blue line) is
about 20dB which is sufficient to get a decent
signal from even very quiet sources (eg.
footsteps on a concrete floor) without excessive
noise from the pre-amps in the mixer. Frequency
response is 20Hz – 30kHz (-3dB) but this is
adjustable; gain at very low frequencies may be
undesirable in which case you can reduce the
values of R1,R2,R5 & R6 or use the low-cut
button common on many mixers

(graph image missing)

How could I use it if I don’t have a desk with
Phantom Power?

You’ll need to make a breakout box containing

some 9V batteries to provide power, a pair of 6k
resistors and some DC blocking caps. You can
select the current that through the FETs when
you build the device, if you plan on running it off
a battery (or from a battery powered device with
phantom power) you may wish to reduce the
quiescent current from the normal ~1mA, to
about 0.1mA or less to increase battery life. This
will increase noise by a few dB but that’s unlikely
to be a problem.

(PCB Layout image missing)

My brother didn’t think I could fit it inside an XLR

plug. He was wrong. This is a tiny (11.5mm x
18mm, or about half the size of a postage
stamp) PCB designed to fit inside a Neutrik XX
series plug. The tab that sticks out of the pcb is
going to be epoxy glued into a recess in the
connector, holding the PCB firmly in place.
Here’s how it looks in situ.

(XLR image missing)

(Downloads missing)

Related Links :

The FET Preamp Cable – Inspiration for the

preamp-in-a-cable idea
Elliott Sound Products – Lots of projects for the
audio electronics hobbyist

I am a media artist, educator, and

life-long tinkerer based in New York
City. This site shares my artwork
and the software and resources I
develop in the course of my
Zach Poff research. Menu

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