Re: What has the Pearly Gates Poll taught us ???
Tone has changed a lot, even in 10 years. When I started using guitar forums about 8 years ago, people were still arguing about true bypass and Mesa Boogie was the suggestion to just about every amp thread. Demoes were done by overchorused or over-gained DeMarco brothers (Are they brothers, or just clones?) or worse, Paul from Guitar World was considered the height of modern tone. I feel like in general, tone and our understanding of sound has gotten so much better as the guitar and effects market has gotten so much more transparent.
That's an interesting take on it, I'm not sure that's 100% it, though. There are trends, like magnet and coil swapping seems to be big all of the sudden, but there are a lot of discussion that are trend-free, like the way a PG or JB interacts with mahogany versus bass wood should be the same now as it was at any other point in time. When I do Google searches and pull up threads talking about JBs or PGs from 2004 or 2007, I see some of the the same forum members in those threads, posting remarks about those pickups which seem like they could have been written yesterday. It's not usually the case in most corners of the Internet that I have to look at the date stamp to figure out what decade a post was written in.
The funny thing about mentioning amplifiers is that a common complaint in these forums is that people will talk about pickups without ever mentioning a) the amp they're using, or b) the style of music they play, so even though the context of music style and amplification changes over the years, it's often not even acknowledged in discussion.
One nice thing about the polls is that they can help form a clear consensus which can be referred to later, though. It would be nice to see more of them, and on a wider range of topics.
It's totally valid to go back and discuss the tonal merits of even the OLDEST of p'ups, the JB, Super Distortion etc and see how they fall with modern ears.
I never said the discussion was invalid, if that's what you're suggesting.
Sound is about much more than what appears on an output chart, as interesting as I think your posts are from an electrical engineering standpoint.
It's amazing what people will infer. The fact that I post charts doesn't mean I think the chart is the entirety of what is interesting about pickups. If I thought the sum of pickups was electrical output response, I wouldn't have bought fifty+ sets in the past fifteen to twenty years. Seymour Duncan and other pickup makers list DC resistance on their pages, and occasionally they list peak resonance and inductance. Would you also infer from the fact that Seymour Duncan posts DCR, peak resonance and inductance figures on their website, that these figures must also represent the entirety of a pickups tonal qualities?
What I love the most about the frequency graphs is that a) it's real data b) it's often new data, c) it allows for objective, rather than subjective, comparisons between two or more pickups. No "
to my ears, the PG is brighter than the '59". The PG either is, or is not, in fact, brighter than a '59. We shouldn't have to leave the measurable properties of a pickup to subjective opinion for another thirty years.