I used to have a DiMarzio SDS1 in the neck position of my old Road Worn Partscaster. It was alright if what you want is non-traditional Strat sound that still sounds unmistably single coil, but I personally didn't find it was amazing. I suppose part of why I didn't like it was becauase it's advertised as being P90-ish, hot, and beefy, but I didn't find any of thsoe statements to hold true, but YMMV.
What such hot Strat PU's have in common with P90's is the inductance. But coil geometry, Q factor and shape of magnetic field are not there, of course.
As a general side note to my new rambling about cable capacitance and inductance : the thing with classic Strat pickups is exactly the same than with original Gibson humbuckers before the birth of boutique brands... All these passive PU's make sense in
context.
Underwound CBS Strat single coils are from the same era than T-Tops. Superficially, one might think that Fender CBS and Gibson Norlin were just trying to save money on wire because sales were increasing. It's probably true to some extent but if it ruined the sound, people would have totally stopped to buy Fender and Gibson guitars. They kept buying these instruments and even liked them because they were plugging to big bassy amps through pedals with a poor input impedance + super long and/or coily capacitive cables.
Some pickup designs just give a similar tone without the cumbersome necessity of a Vox wah to flatten the response + twice 25' of wire to shift the resonant frequency. What is needed for that is just a single coil with a lower Q factor + higher inductance (like models with slugs + ceramic magnets underneath).
But the sound of a classic Strat PU can still be tuned by modifying C and R specs. The following difference, for instance, would just require a 3,3nF from hot to ground instead of 75' of added cable...
Lowering the Q factor by using the tone control would make the first of these two tones closer to the response of a P90, minus the output level of course (and without cancelling the difference due to Fender vs Gibson scales + pickup positions, obviously)...
