North South emg active weirdness with jazz bass

[bsmith23]

I have a pair of active emg pickups in a jazz bass which buzz unless I am facing true north or true south.
I have tried different buildings with different amps and cables and made sure I had a fresh battery in there. No luck.
If I shift even a little from either a strict north or strict south orientation I get buzzing. A funny sounding problem, but it sucks, I can't record with this instrument and am about to replace them with hum cancelling passives unless I figure out what is going on here and can fix it.
So... what is going on here?

Edit:
Local guitar repair dude has never seen this, says 'beats me' and suggests wearing a mexican wrestling mask - he indicates that they are wired correctly - when I took it to him he saw it was grounded and said we might just disconnect that since it's un-needed for actives and emg recommends removing ground for safety reasons. Whatever, it made no difference to the buzz problem.

[bbsailor]

Originally Posted by bsmith23

I have a pair of active emg pickups in a jazz bass which buzz unless I am facing true north or true south.
I have tried different buildings with different amps and cables and made sure I had a fresh battery in there. No luck.
If I shift even a little from either a strict north or strict south orientation I get buzzing. A funny sounding problem, but it sucks, I can't record with this instrument and am about to replace them with hum cancelling passives unless I figure out what is going on here and can fix it.
So... what is going on here?

Edit:
Local guitar repair dude has never seen this, says 'beats me' and suggests wearing a mexican wrestling mask - he indicates that they are wired correctly - when I took it to him he saw it was grounded and said we might just disconnect that since it's un-needed for actives and emg recommends removing ground for safety reasons. Whatever, it made no difference to the buzz problem.

bsmith,

Check all the ground connections in the control compartment and make sure that the strings are well grounded to the pot common ground connections.

Joseph Rogowski

[David King]

Have you talked to Rick at EMG? He's the tech support guy and should have an idea of what's going on here. They have a toll free number listed on the website, (800) 821-1446. Ask for tech support and leave him a message with a call-back number and he'll get back to you in an hour or two usually.
My guess is that you have a big power transformer wherever you go and that is causing all the noise issues. These aren't humbuckers, they just have some respectable shielding around them and the little built-in preamp/ line driver. They are usually pretty good but maybe you live next to the Grand Couleé Dam power house or something...
FWIW EMG will supposedly replace any defective pickups for free and forever.

[David Schwab]

Originally Posted by David King

These aren't humbuckers, they just have some respectable shielding around them and the little built-in preamp/ line driver.

They are indeed humbuckers. They are stacked. The output from the two coils is fed to the differential inputs on an op amp.

If you want the formula, they are wound with 4500 turns of 43AWG on each coil. The bar magnet runs through both coils. You aren't hearing the coils in series though. It's not exactly parallel either.

I've always found EMG's to be dead quiet even in noisy environments. it makes me think that the grounds and hot wires are mixed up going to the output jack. That would make the grounds live, and noisy.