modifying a para-di for TRS delivery of power to a Lyric

[colorado hick]

I have a Lyric in a '52 O-18. I like the sound but HATE the battery. Having it attached deadens the sound and more often then not it ends up coming loose just banging around inside the guitar. Also have had batteries die twice during gigs, and loosening the strings and fishing around int he body of a 60 year old martin makes for a lousy set break. It is not a workable solution for me.

I also have an extra para-DI. I am wondering about doing a mod so that I can feed power over a TRS cord to the pickup. No batteries, no wall warts, no hassle. I have never used the FX loop on the DI so I could re-purpose that jack with a step-down transformer or a big heat sink resistor or something like that. Or perhaps the voltage inside the Para DIs is already stepped down to 9v seeing how it can run on a battery?
Or I can have an external box with a pass-through XLRs that would pull off some juice from the phantom power and light up the TRS. That could possibly have market appeal for other folks.

Has anyone here done this before?

A couple tech questions about the Lyric, when I use a TRS to carry both power and sound does it matter which side of the audio signal lines I combine with the negative DC? Also I am wondering if there is a range of voltage that is acceptable, would it still sound good with 12v or 24v or would that cook it?

I realize that all of these things would not be officially supported by lr baggs but maybe it would get the engineers thinking that a lot gigging musicians despise any sort of mission critical link in their sound chain to be dependent on a 9v battery....

[Caleb_Elling]

Hey colorado hick,
Yeah, unfortunately, this would require warranty-voiding modifications to both the Para DI and the Lyric. So nobody at Baggs would be able to offer advice on this project. I can say that it would not be easy to do.

We have talked about external power supplies, but the tricky thing there is that the "mission-critical" part of the system becomes a much more unique piece of gear. So if you forget the power supply box, lose it, or if you don't have a power adapter or battery for the external power supply, the guitar becomes useless. I usually just recommend checking or changing your battery every time you change strings in order to keep on top of it. I know everyone is different, but that works great for me.

[smithwithaneye]

Just a thought... I have a MiSi pickup in an acoustic guitar that uses the Baggs element for the pickup but where it is very clever is, instead of a battery pack they attached a 9 volt capacitor to the preamp jack assembly. They supply a wall-wart power supply that has a 1/4" jack on the other end... plug it into the AC and the other end into the guitar for one minute and you get about 8 hrs playing time. The capacitor does not form a memory so charge up before each gig. NO BATTERY!!! Maybe you could adapt that system to the Lyric more easily than sending phantom power via TRS ??
Point taken from Caleb though, if you leave the power supply behind... yer hooped. I got in the habit early of keeping it in my guitar case, which helps but s**t happens!