Any valuable info on Lane Poor MM pups?

[David King]

Well you can't get a dcr reading off them, it's open circuit. There's probably an inductor in there too but I can't think of what other component besides a cap in series is going to read open...

[David Schwab]

Well that's interesting. Are those the pickups with the built in mid control? That has to have some kind of LC circuit going on.

[belwar]

I'll see if there's a q-tuner scan available to us.

WOW. what a cool looking pickup! I had never seen those before. I found this image there which I bet is what the narrow wide appeture deal is..



Im interested to see if this is the case.

[David King]

It could be the Wide/ Narrow difference Belwar. That would make sense. Those pickups should be in your hands in a couple of days.

My magnet paper is too old to show much anymore. I wish there was a better medium for examining magnetic fields. Would ferrofluid work for these smallish gauss magnets.

As to the Litz wire, didn't we determine via Joe Guinn that it's use wouldn't have any significant effect at bass/ audible frequencies?

Lane was coming from Monster cable, I don't know what Monster's deal is but it's reputation seems to depend entirely on advertisement. Kinda like Bose...

Monster makes a lot of semi-expensive data cables that are dealing with very high frequencies and perhaps some of that rubbed off. We aren't dealing with high frequencies but we are dealing with a mile or two of length. Perhaps someone can say for sure that Litz might make an audible difference over a mile or something?

[David Schwab]

My magnet paper is too old to show much anymore. I wish there was a better medium for examining magnetic fields. Would ferrofluid work for these smallish gauss magnets.

Put the pickup in a zip-lock sandwich bag, and then sprinkle steel filings on it.

[David King]

From wikipedia.org/litz
"For low frequencies, the effect is negligible. For AC current at frequencies high enough that the skin depth is small compared to the conductor size, the skin effect causes most of the conduction to happen at the conductor's surface. At high enough frequencies, the interior of a large conductor does not carry much current. At 60 Hz, the skin depth of a copper wire is about ⅓ inch (8 mm). At 60 kHz, the skin depth of copper is about about 0.01 inch (0.254 mm). At 6 MHz, the skin depth is about 0.001 inch (25.4 µm). Round conductors larger than a few skin depths don't conduct much current near their axis, so that material isn't used effectively."

My reading of that paragraph is that litz wire isn't going to make any difference at audible frequencies through 42awg magnet wire regardless of the length.

[Joe Gwinn]

From wikipedia.org/litz
...
My reading of that paragraph is that litz wire isn't going to make any difference at audible frequencies through 42awg magnet wire regardless of the length.

You are correct.

[belwar]

Just throwing this out there, but what if the Litz wire was for another purpose, other than the skin effect..

Would there be any other purpose? What if the litz was thinner? Or the ends of the wire were joined in a different way.. That might explain the 35 minute wind time. I think the Canadian is coming out again..

I think I figured out a way a count the Turns of wire - and maybe even the size.. I'm going to follow these steps:

1 - take a pickup, cut it in half
2 - sand / polish the end to near mirror finish - something like 9 micron
3 - scan it on my 4800 DPI scanner.
4 - Transfer the hi-res image into Mastercam or Alias Studio
5 - Individually click on the center of each wire (on half the coil) creating a Vector point
6 - Use mastercam's point tally function to give me a total number of points which would be the total turns per layer.

I *Should* be able to get a Turns per lay count as well if I carefully count a row by hand.. I cant imagine that being more than 200TPL so its doable.

I *Should* also be able to put a size reference in the image so that I could measure the approx diameter of the wire. I'll wind a standard guitar humbucker coil at low speed and very little tension so as not to stretch the wire, then pot it with black CyanoAcrylate and cut the coil the same way and put it in the same scan.. The wire should be roughly the same size as it was on the spool if I do it right.. At least close enough to make a call as to wether the LP was 42 or not.

Overkill? yeah. Fun? hella yeah.

[Joe Gwinn]

Just throwing this out there, but what if the Litz wire was for another purpose, other than the skin effect..

Would there be any other purpose?

Marketing?

What if the litz was thinner? Or the ends of the wire were joined in a different way.. That might explain the 35 minute wind time. I think the Canadian is coming out again..

I think I figured out a way a count the Turns of wire - and maybe even the size.. I'm going to follow these steps:

1 - take a pickup, cut it in half
2 - sand / polish the end to near mirror finish - something like 9 micron
3 - scan it on my 4800 DPI scanner.
4 - Transfer the hi-res image into Mastercam or Alias Studio
5 - Individually click on the center of each wire (on half the coil) creating a Vector point
6 - Use mastercam's point tally function to give me a total number of points which would be the total turns per layer.

I *Should* be able to get a Turns per lay count as well if I carefully count a row by hand.. I cant imagine that being more than 200TPL so its doable.

I *Should* also be able to put a size reference in the image so that I could measure the approx diameter of the wire. I'll wind a standard guitar humbucker coil at low speed and very little tension so as not to stretch the wire, then pot it with black CyanoAcrylate and cut the coil the same way and put it in the same scan.. The wire should be roughly the same size as it was on the spool if I do it right.. At least close enough to make a call as to wether the LP was 42 or not.

Overkill? yeah. Fun? hella yeah.

Once.

[David Schwab]

Marketing?

He didn't publicize that fact though, if he indeed used it. Also, multifilar wire seems to be different from Litz wire. My assumption was it was multifilar wire.

What effect would using multifilar wire have on a pickup? Wouldn't that be like having two coils in parallel wound on the same bobbin?

We would have to try it and see.

[David King]

He didn't publicize that fact though, if he indeed used it. Also, multifilar wire seems to be different from Litz wire. My assumption was it was multifilar wire.

What effect would using multifilar wire have on a pickup? Wouldn't that be like having two coils in parallel wound on the same bobbin?

We would have to try it and see.

That brings us back around to the Fantasma pickup but with a resistor connecting the ends as per patent description in the fantasma thread. (so that we get a DCR reading)

http://music-electronics-forum.com/t11439/

[David King]

Now that my handy new Gaussmeter is working I have been taking some measurements on the Lane poor pickups. It's very curious to see where the pole switches from N to S across the top and down the sides.

I need to make some mock-ups with ceramic bars to see how the magnet alignments and orientations can be recreated.

[David Schwab]

That brings us back around to the Fantasma pickup but with a resistor connecting the ends as per patent description in the fantasma thread. (so that we get a DCR reading)

http://music-electronics-forum.com/t11439/

Those are interesting because you only connect one end of each wire.

I figured if Poor was using the multifilar, he just connected like it was a single strand.

[belwar]

I was sitting in a doctors office in Burbank today reading some documents I had printed out from the archive.org LP site and came across this nugget

The first type is a twin bilateral coil that is made in both a Narrow and Wide magnetic aperture. That's a mouthful. It is easier to think of our Narrow and Wide pickups in terms of the irradiated length of the string, or even more simply as the width of the magnetic window that our pickups look through. Our Narrows (n series) look at a smaller section of the string. We also use pole pieces in these. The result is close to the classic Jazz Pickup sound. It has a good bit of the waw and wow we all expect from this style as the string goes through its round and round (precursing) movement. This occurs mostly with a more aggressive playing style.

Our Wide aperture (w series) sees a wider window, and is a bit rounder and fuller, with just a bit more of bottom end.

Our Humbucker is precisely that. It has an often unexpected and highly praised amount of high end clarity that people have come to enjoy with our other pickups. This probably is the Most Frequently Asked Question about our Humbuckers. Please let me assure you that we keep these very clean, there is no damping or roll off of the high end that is common in virtually all of the classic humbuckers.

It will be interesting to see what is meant by pole pieces.. Its pieces, not piece indicating multiple parts. It's all speculation at this point, but a basic iron filings test should show this to be the case.

[Joe Gwinn]

He didn't publicize that fact though, if he indeed used it. Also, multifilar wire seems to be different from Litz wire. My assumption was it was multifilar wire.

Litz is multifilar; the difference is is the strands are insulated from one another.

What effect would using multifilar wire have on a pickup? Wouldn't that be like having two coils in parallel wound on the same bobbin?

If the strands are in parallel, no effect at all other than that due to the use of what is in effect a lower wire guage.

And David King reminds us of the bifilar pickup that uses inter-strand capacitance to connect the strands into a coil.