Duncan mV output chart - Perpetual Burn vs 59

[Artie]

^^^^ That's funny. I have a little Rikon. I believe that's what the owners manual says. It makes me apprehensive to use it.

[Rex_Rocker]

I actually find a pickup's output is the loudest if you strum chords loudly past the 15th fret or so. I assume that's because you're acutally pushing the strings closer to the pickup itself when you fret higher up.

[freefrog]

I can't imagine how one would accurately measure pickup output voltage in real world terms. I had the luxury of taking a few of my guitars into work a couple times, (Navy Cal lab), to "play" into a really expensive o'scope. A typical 'scope has a 1 meg input Z, which makes a direct connection ideal. On one strike, you'd have an initial peak. The 2nd peak was around 2/3 to 1/2 the 1st peak. Then it faded off quickly. If you put the scope on it's "envelope" function, and strummed like a madman, you could get some semblance of an RMS voltage. But the slightest variation in strumming intensity, was a significant variation is RMS voltage.

I don't see how this could be measured without a robot playing.

As said in my previous post, we obtained coherent results here with a lab meter set to record maximum output voltages then fed by a guitar whose strings were brushed altogether with the strongest possible attack. It always ended with a peak voltage impossible to exceed. Results were not the same than in Duncan or DiMarzio data but weren't that different either and allowed to rank pickups relatively to each others in a totally logical way...

This approach based on peak levels has been used also to record the frequency response of pickups plugged directly to the board. Results were consistent enough to be practically identical with a same pickup tested in the same conditions at 3 years of distance...

So, no need of robotic playing IME. Brute force seems to give meaningful measurements (and it's really the only context in which I'd praise brute force). ;-)

[Chistopher]

Pickup output is meaningless to measure scientifically. To be scientific enough to have any meaning, you would have to run pink noise through the pickup, and display the output as a graph. This is how they do it with speakers. The difference between speakers and guitar pickups is that when you buy a speaker you are assuming that the rest of your system has a fairly neutral color. This is far from the case with a guitar. And if you use pink noise, you aren't taking into account that some pickups tend to be placed closer to the strings than others.

Even if we got this info, how is the layman going to know whether or not the JB's midspike is going to be interpreted by their ear as creating more volume than a Distortion?


Maybe we need to take a step back and consider, in what use case is having this information of any benefit to us. Just reading the advertising literature is generally enough to know if two pickups are going to work together volume wise.

[Mincer]

This brings up the question...what method would provide information the consumer would need in picking out a pickup? 5, 7, 9 EQ graph? Some sort of Scoville scale of hotness?

[freefrog]

Pickup output is meaningless to measure scientifically. To be scientific enough to have any meaning, you would have to run pink noise through the pickup, and display the output as a graph. This is how they do it with speakers.

Applying this method to passive magnetic transducers mainly helps to visualize their resonant peak. But as the resonant frequency is beyond any fundamental note in most cases, it can't be correlated to output level in a reliable way. That's precisely why we use different methods here (peak voltage measurements for output and various kind of polyphonic or mono swept signals for electrically induced resonant peaks, among other tests).

[Rex_Rocker]

I don't think measuring output is meaningless, but some of those values they obtained are just plain confusing.

It would be cool if they had some simpler numeric values like, say, a '59B is a 5, a JB is 7, and a Custom is 7.5-ish, a Distortion is 9, and a Black Winter is 10. Just something arbitrary like that would help out tons. Then again, I'm sure that would be prone to controversy as well.

I know I'm the minority here, but I'm a number freak. My job is pretty much geometry. Output is super important to me because I set my digital modeler and plugins a certain way for one pickup's output, and I like to have the ability to plug different stuff in without having to majorly readjust input and/or gain levels. And if I do, I kinda like to know by how much. But that's just me.

[80's_Thrash_Metal]

I measure them all by how easily they pick squeal....