Seymour's new cryo-silver pickup

[frankfalbo]

Mike, you act like we owe you a detailed report of our entire R&D process. No.

You want to know what silver wire sounds like? Source some and start winding and testing. Increase copper's diameter to match the resistance?! No. Then your coil geometry has changed. Thin the insulation to match the OD? No. Then you change the dielectric, etc.

You want to know what the biggest contributor to the sonic differential is? Make some pole pieces, find a cryo center, get silver wire of all gauges, experiment with bobbin materials, or better yet-go back in time and BE us. Then you'll know. I'm happy to share information like no, the poles, while big, are not the biggest contributor. The bobbin material is arguably the smallest contributor. I can also tell you that the differences are contributory and complimentary.

I'll try to answer as many questions and objections that I can, but the rest of you can understand the concept of maintaining some propriety in intellectual property. Truth is, I some of you try silver wire, you may do something entirely different with it, and good on you if you do.

[Mike Sulzer]

Mike, you act like we owe you a detailed report of our entire R&D process. No.

You want to know what silver wire sounds like? Source some and start winding and testing. Increase copper's diameter to match the resistance?! No. Then your coil geometry has changed. Thin the insulation to match the OD? No. Then you change the dielectric, etc.

You owe me nothing of the kind, of course, and I never implied that you did. Geometry: you seem to have misunderstood what I wrote way up at the top. If you replace the silver with copper, increasing the diameter by about 2% and thinning the insulation by a bit to keep the total diameter the same, you have not changed the coil geometry. You have raised the capacitance a bit. So looking at the change in the other direction, you could get a lower capacitance with silver than copper, or, for example, if you keep the metal diameter and insulation the same, you get a somewhat higher Q in the resonant circuit. Neither of these effects makes a huge difference in the sound, and either can be gotten in other ways if they are needed. This is why I think the silver cannot make much difference.

Maybe I will change my opinion someday when I hear them, or may be not. You do not need to try to convince me, but if you wish to, I will listen.

[salvarsan]

@FunkyKikuchiyo:
You ask questions.
You get answers.
You don't pay attention.
Then you wonder why people roll their eyes at you.

@frankfalbo:
Irrespective of the endeavor, nothing happens until money talks.

What is the projected production volume of the Zephyr silver 'buckers?
Are they on allocation?
Who sells them?
In short, can anyone buy one or two for audition without papal dispensation?

Yeah, I'm sure they sound great but unless they are commercially available, announcing them without distribution is like sucking down a few beers and pissing in a velvet suit:

Feels good, but nobody else can see it.

!For the record!
I think it's great that Seymour Duncan is doing something new, innovating within the idiom, and has the guts to put it out in front of guitar players, a predictably reactionary group when it comes to gear.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

You never gave me answers... I asked legitimate questions which STILL have not been answered (or rather, made the statement that there were questions TO be answered) and then you just called me stupid. There were no answers to listen to. If that is your answer for everything, then well... good for you. Such is the life of a sophist. But, someone not taking everything YOU say as gospel truth doesn't mean they "aren't listening".

I will retract what I said about the R&D process - it does seem from what Frank is saying that they put more time into experimenting with the stuff than I originally thought; cynicism made me assume they merely substituted silver for copper and went with it. But, I still say that the high R&D costs are what would make using silver wire very difficult; the R&D process is important because, as Frank is pointing out, you just can't predict what the wire will do until you TRY it. That was my original point when everyone told me that I must just be a noob and know nothing about winding pickups if I can't say exactly what it would do... and then everyone started arguing because they can't agree on what it would do! The production costs can simply (or not so simply) be passed on to the end user, but the R&D costs could stack up fast. Seymour has deeper pockets and could justify it as a labor of love, and stands a much better chance of recouping those losses in the long run.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go back to my finger painting and cartoons (can't stress myself beyond my mental capacity too much, ya know)

[Rick Turner]

Mike, when any technology is mature, and I think that high impedance guitar pickups are a reasonably mature field, then changes, "improvements", etc. are incrementally smaller and smaller. 100% effort for a 1% difference, etc. That you or anyone can scoff before you listen or even pay attention to players who have played and listened to a product takes me right back to your early assertions that parallel pickup loading sounds no different from series loading. You are all up in your head about theory, and you don't listen to products before deciding how they sound. You reject ideas based on your ideas, not based upon experience. That just blows my mind.

I'd be fine with hearing no difference with these pickups, and I'd still laud the effort. As it is, I haven't heard them, and I'm not going to weigh in on how they sound until I do. I'd suggest that others might find this a useful exercise. And then if we do hear them, that would be the time to try to figure out just which changes made the differences.

I can tell you this; a number of recording pros love silver wire and gold plated silver contacts in patch bays, especially some of the relay patch bays:

Detailed description: Sound Performance Lab


These guys make their living with sound, not theory.

[Rick Turner]

I can tell you a little bit about the R&D commitment made by Seymour and Cathy to my concept of a digital modeling acoustic guitar preamp, the D-TAR Mama Bear. R&D costs on that thing were in excess of a quarter of a million dollars, and we'll never make it back on that product. But these people care. They're willing to take financial risks to learn. All of the people I generally deal with in that organization are musicians who use what they design and make. They get incredibly good musicians in on the alpha and beta testing stages. We had Laurence Juber come in and listen to Mama Bear when that product was half in a lap top and half on a bench with wires sprouting out of perf boards and prototype PC cards. LJ came in playing his Martin with one of our pickups through the lashed together digital modeler, and at one point he said, "I hear cedar and koa." That sent us scrambling for the legend...this was truly a double blind test at that point. Sure enough, the model he was playing his Martin through was a cedar topped, koa back and sided Ed Claxton guitar. Blew our minds, but that's the quality of musician that the Duncan company relies upon for product development.

Believe it or not, there are people whose hearing is so developed that they can hear subtle differences that ordinary folks cannot hear. It's like those who have perfect pitch or those who can detect the faintest odors or tastes. We cannot judge the perception of others by our own.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

These guys make their living with sound, not theory.

Thanks for the link!

I'd go a step further and say that all great science is based on experiments. From experiments you get your data. From your data you get your theories. Unless we have Schroedinger's Pickup and measuring the DC resistance changes the sound, I think this applies to pickup making.

Thanks also for the comments about Duncan R&D. I definitely retract my earlier cynicism.

[Mike Sulzer]

...takes me right back to your early assertions that parallel pickup loading sounds no different from series loading. You are all up in your head about theory, and you don't listen to products before deciding how they sound. You reject ideas based on your ideas, not based upon experience. That just blows my mind.

Really? Actually you suggested a listening test, and predicted the wrong answer, both from the point of view of theory and from listening. The listening test I proposed, based on theory, gave the correct answer. Look it up. Obviously listening tests are essential because there is no way to know exactly how many changes are perceived except to listen, but there is little point in following up on things that make no sense when there is so much else to do.

For example, as I wrote above, when silver wire replaces copper wire, you can effectively get lower capacitance. But you can do that with a shorter cable, and a shorter cable does sound different. But this is not the sort of change that justifies the cost involved in using silver wire.

[edwardta]

I have a few questions about these pickups, if I may:

Can anyone tell me if silver wire (and silver-plated copper) is ALWAYS insulated with Teflon?

Frankfalbo: is the wire you are using for these pickups insulated with Teflon? I did not see this information anywhere else. Teflon has a low dielectric constant, and I understand that differences in dielectric constants in magnet wire insulations can result in slight audible differences, due to the differences in capacitance. If they are, did you try something additionally like teflon insulated copper wire (if it is even available)to compare? This would assume, of course, that you considered it a positive attribute of your new pickups.

Thanks,
Edward T.

[Rick Turner]

Silver wire can be insulated with anything you choose, just like copper wire. Just go onto some of the magnet wire manufacturers' sites and look at the options.

I have wound pickups using Teflon insulated 44 ga. copper wire, and the pickups sound really good. I'm tempted to say a little better than the ones I wind with my usual wire, but I'd need to go back and do some up to date careful listening. The Teflon wire, especially that small, is not easy to work with. You have to sand off the Teflon to get to the copper to solder it, and doing that without breaking the wire is a trick and a half. There are chemical strippers that work with Teflon, but I don't want to work with them.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Rick, are you willing to share with us a good source for teflon wire, or is that top secret? I know a company in Vermont will sell it, but at prohibitive pricing... at least prohibitive for most of us here. I haven't tried it yet, but I would love to. I've had great luck with teflon capacitors and hookup wire, I can't imagine that it is anything less than stellar as a magnet wire insulation.

To others looking for the wire, I've found that about half the time companies that use teflon won't use the name teflon as it is a trademark of dupont, but instead PTFE (poly tetra fluoro ethylene) - it helps to open up search results if you search that way.

[Rick Turner]

I bought about 7 lbs. of the stuff at a surplus store in LA about 15 years ago at a "copper by the pound" price. Read and weep! I'm very aware of what the stuff is worth on today's market.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

You had my hopes up and then crushed them mightily. Good show.

[Joe Gwinn]

Can anyone tell me if silver wire (and silver-plated copper) is ALWAYS insulated with Teflon?

It's the other way around: Teflon insulated wire is always silver-plated copper (or solid silver), because teflon is extruded onto the wire at a temperature above the melting point of tin, the more common coating for copper wire.

[Joe Gwinn]

The Teflon wire, especially that small [44], is not easy to work with. You have to sand off the Teflon to get to the copper to solder it, and doing that without breaking the wire is a trick and a half. There are chemical strippers that work with Teflon, but I don't want to work with them.

The standard way to strip teflon on wire that small is with a thermal stripper. And an extraction fan to remove the noxious smoke generated by the red-hot stripper blades.