I suppose it's all about what constitutes a change. I've said things as a Seymour Duncan VP of Product Development that I can sleep well on, and they are all searchable on the net. It's true, however, that I'll only speak in generalities at this point. I think if someone (either from the company or outside the company) said that the wind of the JB has never changed, it would be accurate. Again that's all stuff that can be searched in today's technology age. I see a lot of guys start talking about how their JB reads "hot" or "cool" and their assumption is based on the DC resistance. But companies have a range of tolerance for DCR.
So say a company (any company) posts a DC spec of 18k and you find an old pickup that reads 16k or 20k, it doesn't necessarily mean the company changed its recipe. There are so many variables that you'd never be able to know about from that. A winder could have the tension too high or low. A batch of wire could be a little thick or a little thin. A flat-out mistake could have been made, choosing the wrong wire off the shelf. Whether a company catches these things or lets the product through is up to the particular company, who's in charge at any given time, etc. None of these things should be considered a change at face value. A change would be more like if someone changed the winding spec up or down, or the pitch, etc.
I've never worked for Dimarzio, but I can say that I have seen first hand and owned various Dimarzios where the magnet size was very different. I've seen same model Ceramic pickup with a smaller magnet and a metal strip to connect to the poles, and others with a magnet that is rightly sized. I've seen and own same model Alnico V pickups where the magnet was extra tall, and others where it was standard height. I've seen readings from Rich at IbanezRules across multiple Jems (which had stock PAF Pros) and aftermarket PAF Pros that ranged from low 8k all the way up to 11k. I can't confirm that first-hand, but that's a huge range to report. I only state these things as facts, not to be negative, just to give an overview. In fact, Dimarzio has a pickup called the PAF that has been changed completely a few years back to include a lot of their new technology. They explicitly disclosed all of this, but they just left the model numbers the same, so you'd have to know what year yours was made to really know what you had.
So personally I wouldn't suggest
any company changed a winding spec unless I personally sat there and hand-unwound some coils. Personally sent off metals for analysis, etc. So now we come to something like rough-cast magnets. As you guys can search and infer from posts I and others have already made throughout the years, rough cast are less consistent than ground magnets. The dimensions of ground magnets are extremely tight. So as a manufacturer, would you consider that an improvement? I might, if it was the 1980's and I was trying to build a company on quality and consistency, where other companies (like the big two guitar companies) were starting to make product that was all over the map. If you had a plastic that was too soft for bullet-proof wax potting, would you upgrade to one that could take the heat? If you weren't making a P.A.F. replica, and you could substitute a plastic spacer for the maple one, you'd get more consistency (no expansion and contraction with sweat or temp changes) would you choose the more consistent and much cheaper one?
What's missing from the 1980's to today is that no one would care about these things in the 1980's. They
would probably care if their pickup became deformed from the heat of a car trunk, scratched easily, squealed, or worse, if you bought 5 more from the same batch and they were not consistent. So if I were building a pickup company in the 1980's I would probably value all of these things. Furthermore, there was not a huge internet forum community parsing all of these little idiosyncracies. Making a small manufacturing improvement didn't mean you "changed" anything because it fell so far under the radar. Now we have boutique pedals and amps, $200 cables, and we're sitting in our little home studios with our ears smashed against the speaker to hear the slightest differences between two gnat farts.
So now we get to the subject of misinformation, etc. and I believe reasonable people can agree that there are a lot of semantics involved:
"Are those the same pants you had on yesterday?"
"Yes, but they've been washed"
"Then no they're not, with each wash they've been altered"
As for taking every post with a grain of salt, that's a good idea always. But here's my advice, if you find one of my old posts, and it seems like its saying something different than someone else's post, I'd bet on mine...
