LR Baggs M80 vs iRig Acoustic Stage Pickup Test

I install an LR Baggs M80 acoustic soundhole pickup in my Gibson SJ200 and compare it A/B with my iRig Acoustic Stage soundhole (clip on) pickup. The first part is the unboxing of the pickup, the second part is a brief installation and the last part, I just play a number of different styles and capo positions and switch the audio back and forth between the M80 and the iRig.

There is no processing here. I fed the signal from each pickup into the left and right channels of my Zoom UAC-2 digital audio interface, hard panned left and right into two tracks of my DAW Studio One 3. Then I soloed each of the two tracks individually and created a wave file for each pickup with no processing at all. I cut back and forth from pickup to pickup by cutting the two audio tracks in my video editor.

The very end of the video I used both tracks together and hard panned them left and right.

Please comment on your impressions of the two pickups.

The LRBaggs M80 sells for $359 Cdn and the iRig Acoustic Stage sells for $129.99 Cdn at Long & McQuade.

For my money, the iRig sounds pretty decent stacked up against one of LR Baggs' top of the line soundhole pickups.

I think the difference is the Baggs is a magnetic pickup and the iRig is a microphone. I heard a lot of the brittle, magnetic sound from the Baggs.

For recording purposes, I would not use the Bagg pickup. The iRig gives me a good quality range of sound that allows me to adjust it with processing later. Whereas, the iRig isn't as powerful or as robust sounding as the M80 through an acoustic amp for live performance. That's my $0.02. What's yours?

LR Baggs M80:
https://www.lrbaggs.com/pickups/m80-a...

iRig Acoustic Stage:
https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products...

My previous review and unboxing of the iRig Acoustic Stage:
   • iRig Acoustic Stage Pickup Unboxing a...