Re: Aluminum wound pickups?
Is it a gimmick? Yes and no. It's a valid alternative to winding magnet wire on a coil. But is it necessary? The advantages they state are precision and consistency. But regular pickups are already very consistent. How much precision is needed? I hand wind pickups and they all come out with very close readings. And the bit they are off is nothing you can hear.
Everything is built to a tolerance, be it massed produced etching in a commercial Fab house, or some schmo hand tensioning wire with a home made winder, it's all down to what those tolerances are and how application specific they possibly can be. It also depends on what that basis of comparison is. I would have a hard time believing precision is even an argument when comparing something being turned out in a FAB house by the thousands, and something being computer wound by the thousands. That argument may have a little more merit if their basis for comparison was the FAB house turning out thousands of pcb's to someby randomly scatter winding each coil with a hand winder, and even then what type of tolerances in percentages are we talking? I'm kind of preaching to the choir a bit here.
mmicky is the whole hype around them. Calling them "world class" is unwarranted. But they are innovative. There's no such thing as the "best" pickups. It's all subjective.
Well you have to sell them somehow. From conception to reality is only half the battle, Making them fly off the shelves is another completely.
.
I've never seen a PCB that was not copper clad. It's an easy material to work with. If you used something else what would the benefits be? All you are doing is changing the DC resistance per foot.
Most most fab houses will offer both silver and gold plated copper traces, but never different conducting alloys. I'm sure the cost, ability to etch the materials, and sheer impractical application comes into play.
The only reason to use a preamp with a pickup is for impedance matching (such as with low Z coils) or for tone shaping.
I would say more for signal transfer, and tone shaping, but that's not the only thing. Amplification seems to be a pretty important one as well.
The interesting thing is that many guitarists would not like the tone of a low Z coil. That includes Alumitones and Fluence. They would find them too bright with lots of finger noise. Almost the way the guitar sounds unplugged.
So it's common to make them sound like high impedance pickups through tone shaping.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
That's kind of the paradoxical beauty, and drawback of active design. It opens up a whole new world to sculpt with so your not stuck to the relative conventions of passive designs, but at the possible expense of creating something very synthetic even when trying to match the response of typical guitar pickups. With in reason, you can make the preamp do all sorts natural or unnatural things to the pickups response ... fabricate the resonance frequency anywhere in the audio band, or create mutiple ones and sum them, extend bandwidth, creating any kind of frequency response and signal level youre looking for and so on and so on. Now I'm just rambling
