What's the deal with Vox CoAxe pickups?

[Mark Hammer]

When a Vox guitar showed up for sale on Kijiji, I was reminded of how odd the pickups on the more recent Vox guitars were. I poked around and found this site with a little more technical insight: http://www.planetz.com/vox-coaxe-interview-with-vox-rd/
VERY unusual design. Any experience with these? Are there things they do well, and things they don't do quite as well as more familiar designs?

[Helmholtz]

Some info/data contained here: https://www.gitec-forum-eng.de/wp-co...collection.pdf

[Mark Hammer]

thanks. Much to chew on there.

[Mike Sulzer]

The "multi-purpose" pickup is an interesting challenge. I think the gitec article probably has it right: they do not quite do what is claimed. Of course, they still might do exactly what you want, and so the only way to know is to listen.

I think the sidewinder design is the best to use to get a pickup with very good hum cancellation that will do both what Vox calls the lead tone (cut highs, boosted mids, intended for lots of distortion) and something more intended for clean playing. A humbucker size sidewinder (using #42 and #44 wire) can have about 3.2 H (something like a telecaster bridge pickup) and 9 H (like an overwound humbucker). It is only a single row of poles, and so it cannot sound exactly like a humbucker, but we put the compromise where it matters least. The filtering introduced by the two rows of poles in the standard humbucker affects only the highest harmonics on the wound strings, and these are high in frequency. The high inductance in this case means that they are mostly filtered out, and so the tfiltering from the pole location matters little if at all.