new gibson ccontrol cavity circuit board CRAP

[Steve Conner]

Well, what is objective truth in a world where nobody does any objective measurements? Guitar pickup customers certainly don't. (The Stereophile argument again )

The way I see it, any wannabe pickup maker can come on here and spout some BS about eiderdown insulated wire, a prospective customer reads it, buys the pickup for a silly price, hears exactly what he's been primed to hear by the advertising copy and is delighted by the purchase. Business as usual in the audio industry.

Unless the other pickup makers manage to make him look foolish somehow, then they may get the sale instead, which I think explains some of the heated debates on here.

The hi-fi industry (and I guess the boutique pickup industry, by my snidey implications!) has a kind of groupthink. Once some influential person equates sonic characteristic X with material Y, and publicises the fact, everyone else hears the same, because they've been primed to, or simply don't want to look foolish. That explains why people agree on the sonic characteristics of MOSFETs and so on, and more importantly, why any future customers of the eiderdown pickup will be delighted too, hearing the same sonic attributes, for the simple reason that they read each others' online reviews before listening to the unit.

Since there's no objective way to measure how good an electric guitar system feels to play, all of this is unavoidable to some extent. You might as well just go to Stewmac and buy your own lottery ticket. (Don't forget to pick up some cryo treated lion dung for your flatwork.)

[jmaf]

Well, what is objective truth in a world where nobody does any objective measurements? Guitar pickup customers certainly don't.

The last pickup I bought as a teenage mutant guitar player was based on the objective measurement that Joe Satriani appeared using one on Guitar for the Practicing Musician.

[RedHouse]

...Those like you who favor censorship never want it to apply to them...

I'm guessing you don't get out much but when you do it's not exactly a pub-crawl. When you go out to public venue's for some social interaction (I'm hoping you do anyway) do you find people tend migrate to the other end of the bar so they can talk about football, or cars, or what ever they think is cool, without a diatribe on the details of physics or aerodynamics? I'm just guessing here, have no data to back me up.

Some people don't like to continually re-focus every freekin discussion on the academic aspects of something like the pickup making craft. Yes, it's a craft, not science. Many here kinda wish there could be more talk, less squawk.

Joe Blow posts a question about what magnets sound best for this-or-that pickup, they're not usually asking for a "explanation" of magnetic flux vs core material vs eddy currents vs metalurgical recipie variants etc. Sure some do, but most are actualy asking the exact question they asked, don't need the physics "explained" to them. You're posts tend re-state others questions/statements to allow youself the avenue to flex what you feel is your intellectual prowess with "explanations" of things, don't be blinded by reason of your brightness. Sure I do wish you might have an epiphany and realise many folks don't particularly appreciate "explaining" to them what they are talking about when they talk. .

Sensorship? don't be silly.

Ever occur to you that there are a lot of people who visit this forum who do not post, not because they are just lurkers, but because of the way a few high-brow members tend to brow-beat the less technically inclined/educated over the littlest things, and the verbiage of their posts.

When I asked David (S) about a sub-forum where you and the others who deeply relish chewin-the-fat on all the physics/theory/references and all that entails, I meant a place where you can have-at-it without a virtual throw-down whenever people make subjective statement, or opinion, or an "I like this, don't like that" or "I think this, and don't think that" post.

That's not sensorship Mike, that's moving discussions to an appropriate area IMHO, happens all the time on other forums, threads go an a tangent or off-topic and (mods) move the discussions to the appropriate area. I would think that notion would get some traction around here as our mods tend to like to engage in the academic discussions.

As it is now, we have this one main thread area in the forum where people post, then the threads get pulled this way and that. Sometimes one has to scroll though several pages of "stuff" to get past a scientific discussion (tangent), or virtual call outs, just to get back to seeing anything relative to the OP's original content, or actual contributions to an answer.

If that was a once-in-a-while thing nobody would care, but the past several years that happens to nearly every thread that gets posted.

[RedHouse]

...Since there's no objective way to measure how good an electric guitar system feels to play, all of this is unavoidable to some extent...

Well said Steve.

I'd like to take that one step further with the notion, perhaps we need not try to shoe-horn all things into objective criteria. When someone says chocolate tastes good, the best we can do is either agree or disagree, but to strive for measurable validity of the persons statement is foolish IMHO.

[Mike Sulzer]

I
If that was a once-in-a-while thing nobody would care, but the past several years that happens to nearly every thread that gets posted.

You think I am the biggest problem, so let's see how bad it is. I do not think I contributed in this discussion until about page 4 of five. By then it was way off the original topic, and as far as I am concerned pretty much anything goes in that situation. Your objection was that I agreed with what you heard and told you why you heard it: you got upset and went out the door. So? You want to make a rule that no one can say anything about the engineering of pickup circuits even when relevant.

Then there is the discussion about solder, and about five other topics. It was off topic before the end of the first page. It looks to me as though everyone except you was having a pretty good time.

I started a discussion about string sampling. It is scientific, and I do have a lot to say there. You can avoid such discussions completely. You do not have to go there and lay an egg.

So I think what it comes down to is that you do not like what I write or how I think, and you want to do something about it by moving me somewhere else. How is that not censorship?

[big_teee]

I think there is room for everyone, All Aspects, and all opinions.
Hang in there Guys, I think there has been a full Moon Lately!
Terry

[RedHouse]

...and you want to do something about it by moving me somewhere else. How is that not censorship?

Nope, I don't wanna move you, I just think it might be nice for you to have your own sandbox to play in, many just wanna talk about stuff, opinions, w/o the constant intellectual throw-down. As for me, yes I can walk away from your thing but don't mind commenting on it.

I am of the opinion that we need this main thread area for mainsteam level topics, conversation (and opinions) etc, and perhaps an area for more in-depth, academic level, churn for those such as yourself who need it. I would not "put" you there, you would naturally migrate to a place like that as it would host the level of discussion you desire. Or I don't know, maybe it would be a place for the same half dozen people to hang out and argue, whatever.

To be clear Mike, I'm not focusing on you because I'm answering your post here, it's just something that has become prevalent here, everyone being challenged to "prove" their opinion/statement, or convince the next guy why he must agree/disagree, which has become the status quo here as of late.

I think there is room for everyone, All Aspects, and all opinions.

The Beginners corner needs Questions answered and Explained from time to time, from the advanced Members, but Please keep it basic

I do too, but there are also a lot of folks here who are definately not beginners but not so much interested in arguing academia (or having it infest every thread).

Do we ever see a Joe Blow post anymore like "I like the cragg-a-frazitz capacitor in my guitar" and then "oh why's that 'cause" and then see "well, because it sounds better to me" ....and then see (wait for it).... "oh, well not so much for me in my guitar, but that's cool you like it and find good application of it".

Hell no, now days it's "I like the cragg-a-frazitz capacitor in my guitar" then "oh why's that 'cause" then "well, because it sounds better to me" ....and then "you can't make a statement like that, there is no proof, show me proof that your cragg-a-frazitz capacitor is any different that another, what guitar, what pots, what pickups, what magnets, that's just subjective, no validity ...no unless you can prove that statement you're full-of-it, talkin out yer arse, on you're bike mate".

That's what I'm talking about, not sensorship, or any of that.

[Dave Kerr]

I enjoy reading the comments from those who attempt to find a scientific explanation for what others perceive. When those comments start to get way over my head I skip past them. What's wrong with your page-down key?

[RedHouse]

...What's wrong with your page-down key?

Nothing, but it's getting all the paint rubbed off with all the paging down.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Nothing, but it's getting all the paint rubbed off with all the paging down.

I see where RH is coming from. The explanations are great and have helped me a lot, but I do see a lot of threads where someone says something like "I tried this and it worked well" or "I prefer this to this for these reasons" inevitably a bunch of people jump into the discussion saying their observations are completely invalid until they provide complete explanations and double blind tests. It really slows down discussions. It sends the message to a lot of humble crafters of pickups that if you can't talk the EE talk and don't want to set up a high end recording room to make samples, you aren't welcome on this forum. Personal experiences of some very talented people are immediately doubted. I'm not saying that you can't take someone else's experiences with a grain of salt, but that is why this is a forum and not a lecture hall. I consider myself to have very good ears and can spot very small things and it is frustrating to be consistently told that I'm just a hi-fi geek or whatever (which definitely isn't the case). Personally, I think it is dangerous to be overly empirical - audio is a very hard thing to measure and quantify. If we were able to completely quantify audio, then modelling technology would've taken over the world by now.

[jmaf]

... I do see a lot of threads where someone says something like "I tried this and it worked well" or "I prefer this to this for these reasons" inevitably a bunch of people jump into the discussion saying their observations are completely invalid until they provide complete explanations and double blind tests. It really slows down discussions. It sends the message to a lot of humble crafters of pickups that if you can't talk the EE talk and don't want to set up a high end recording room to make samples, you aren't welcome on this forum. Personal experiences of some very talented people are immediately doubted. ...

Man, can I relate to that. A lot of folks get into tube amplifiers and music electronics out of pure curiosity and passion, you don't need a PhD from MIT to walk the walk, as long as you get along at the bench and don't kill yourself learning.

[Steve Conner]

Well, I used to think I knew what I was talking about and I agreed with Mike's diehard objective stance. But I had a few experiences that convinced me it's not as simple as firing up a FFT analyser and saying "Look, science, therefore I'm right and you're a ninny." There are several layers of mapping in the brain between the level that measurements represent, and the level of subjective appreciation. I don't believe there is anything paranormal going on, but on the other hand I don't think we understand the mapping in any scientific way.

The craftsman types on the other hand, don't need to understand the mapping, they use it by living it. I think this is what it means to "trust your ears". It actually works. Unless maybe they're telling you to spend 20 bucks on a capacitor, then it's time for a sanity check from science. Maybe those magic caps from EBay sound so unique because they're out of tolerance, high ESR and leaky, and $1 worth of caps and resistors would give you the same tone, but it would be reliable.

Good designers of anything are both artists and scientists. (And probably interesting company at the bar, too.) Henry Royce used some very expensive materials and painstaking processes in his Merlin engine, but every one of them needed to be there, there were no vintage bumblebee capacitors and the like. It sounded pretty good too.

[FunkyKikuchiyo]

Well said, Steve. I think what you're getting at (and many others) is simply that it is important to have a healthy amount of skepticism. I mean, $50 cryo treated AC wall outlets to plug your hi-fi into? I really don't need to break it down scientifically to be skeptical. I lost track of the number of times I've been surprised that this or that actually made a sonic difference to my surprise... though the wall outlets aren't going to have me convinced any time soon. The larger issue is what level, and what sort of proof do you require?

Empirical data gives us one-dimensional, single snapshots, while listening gives us the whole picture at once. It is the basic forest/trees dilemma. The problem with listening is that we often can't narrow it down to that single variable like reading a single datum can. Decreasing highs can sound like boosted mids, etc. The biggest listening mistakes I hear are when someone hears something (legitimate observation) and then proceeds to theorize on why it is the way it is, and then they make a fool of themselves. The problem with empiricism is that A) you have to know which metrics to cover, and B) you trust that absolutely every variable can be accurately measured. Does ANYONE have sufficient equipment to measure every parameter? It is like the dreaded pickup customers who only ever look at DCR. They want that number to tell them everything. Having a few more numbers at your disposal is good... but it still doesn't tell you everything. How many numbers does it take to understand an audio image or electric phenomenon completely?

[Steve Conner]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, but it won't help resolve the issue, as we all have our own idea of what amount of skepticism is a "healthy level". Personally I think the appropriate level varies depending on how much of whose money is at stake.

Empirical data and listening results complement each other, and we should strive to understand the relationships between them. I believe that work you do here has a huge payoff. It can be as simple as running stuff through an EQ to get a feel for what boosts and cuts at different frequencies sound like. Instead of just being "too boomy" now you can say your prototype has about 8dB too much energy at 120Hz, and that gives you a correlation with the physics.

Sometimes you want an overall picture, sometimes you want a one-dimensional "section" from your lab equipment. Sometimes a doctor will just talk to the patient, sometimes he'll order up a scan on a CT machine the size of a semi truck.

We know how many numbers it takes to understand an electric phenomenon. We don't know how many more it takes to understand a subjective image. We can't even say that the same electric phenomenon always maps to the same subjective image, because the mapping is in the brain of the listener, and it changes all the time.

[David Schwab]

Yep, because sound and tone are subjective, this whole thing about certain individuals calling BS on other peoples subjective opinion is silly, people like what they like.

There's a difference between you like a certain kind of cap, and that they sound different. We need to differentiate between the two. Let's call a spade a spade.

I like the little square box caps. I mostly like them because I like the way they look, and they are nice and compact, and they sound as good as any other cap I have tried. Some of the best sounding tone controls in some of my guitars have the little green film caps from RadioShack. I have never run into a cap that sounded bad, only one that had a value I didn't like in a particular guitar.

I've had customers bring me their guitars and also some orange drops or whatever to install because they didn't like their tone control. Of course the guitar sounded exactly the same with the new caps. Some of them later commented on that, while others thought it sounded better. One guy wanted a grease bucket style control because his neck pickup was muddy. He believed that would fix it. Afterwards he said he liked the original tone circuit better, and his neck pickup was still muddy! I told him this would be the case before I did the work, but the customer wants what he wants.