Digitech’s Vocalist Live FX: Anti-feedback for (relatively) cheap?
Digitech has announced the Vocalist Live FX, a vocal (duh) processor that includes anti-feedback circuitry with (according to Digitech) up to 12 bands of frequency filters, in addition to Lexicon reverb and dbx compression. 
The device comes with an MSRP of $350, which suggests that it’ll be available from retail outlets in the neighborhood of $250. That’s about a third less than the price of a Kinder AFB+, the basic standard for harp anti-feedback devices. And the Kinder doesn’t pack a reverb or compressor, either. However, as Steve T points out in his comments below, the VLF doesn’t have 1/4″ high impedance inputs or outputs, so harp players who use hi-z mics in particular are likely to find it difficult to use. (I’ve used inline converters to convert lo-z mics to hi-z; I suppose it should be possible to do the reverse. As I recall, Radio Shack used to sell a cheap 4-in 1-out line mixer with 1/4″ inputs and a mic level output–don’t recall whether it was XLR or not–so I guess it’s been done in some fashion.) The Vocalist Live FX includes a feature called Live Adapt that listens to key, tempo, and so on to assign FX settings (such as, we presume, delay and/or reverb settings), and the feedback suppression is automatic.
I’m a little confused about the availability of this piece. Digitech’s site says it’s available as of April 2013, i.e. three months ago; but it doesn’t seem to be available at Musician’s Friend, Sweetwater, or any of the other usual suspects. I’ll ping the guys at Digitech to ask what’s up with that. In the meantime, this thing looks like it might be useful for harp players, so stay tuned.
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If this piece had a 1/4″ high z input the harp community would probably be real excited about it.
Hi Steve, good catch. A 1/4″ hi-z input would be a nice add. My guess is that you could use various adapters to make it work without the 1/4″ I/O, but it would certainly take more work for someone. Lots of harp players already use lo-z mics with a lo-z to hi-z adapter, so this wouldn’t be much of a problem for them–just put the lo-to-hi-z adapter on the output of the device, instead of on the mic cable that goes into the device. I’m not sure what you’d do if the mic was already equipped with a hi-z 1/4″ cable.