LR Baggs HiFi – Guitar Player’s Gear of the Year 2023
Acoustic Bridge Pickup System
January 12, 2024
The HiFi is a simple and affordable plug-and-play acoustic bridge pickup system that bottles a guitar’s acoustic essence and electrifies it in unique fashion for vivacious and organic tone. It’s like a cross between a mic and a hot, sensitive pickup, with none of the feedback issues.
HiFi captures string brilliance and body percussives in a way that transcends the middy tone of a typical magnetic soundhole pickup, with none of the plastic quack associated with an undersaddle piezo.
A pair of transducers adhere non-invasively under the bridge plate, and a high-fidelity preamp sculpts the output signal.
According to Baggs, the HiFi is the next-level version of the company’s iBeam active bridge-plate pickup system, as well as a response to a challenge thrown down by Lloyd Baggs’ friend and tone chaser Jackson Browne. $199. lrbaggs.com — Jimmy Leslie, Guitar Player Magazine
