roger bayliss wrote: No other noiseless pickup hits the vintage spot to my knowledge, so hats off !
Thanks for that Roger and leddo (Phil Lynch), and of course I agree with you wholeheartedly LOL. Going back to Hanks request for true 50's sounding pickup some years ago, I tried hard but he hadn't allowed enough time, see, development of these kinds of high performance pickups takes years, not months. The technical challenges are formidable and the Impersonator series Strat pickups wouldn't have materialized at all if not for a patented magnetic circuit invention I previously designed (2009) to bring my P-90 Hx to life. And bring it to life it did, superbly. I wondered if it could be applied to Fender type pickups with rod magnets since the P-90 Hx has bar magnets and a different magnetic circuit. I didn't do anything but wonder ... and cringe at the amount of work and wasted wire and components finding out required because I had learnt from the P-90 Hx that this magnetic circuit device demanded way way different coil design and thinking than anything I has previously come up with. The formidable challenge of inventing my compact design with differential coils was the other great challenge but in many ways the magnetic device was even more formidable because of it's hypersensitivity to small changes in coil specifications.
It was Hanks request that prompted me to to begin development on this new kind of Strat pickup which, after years of work, gave rise to the Gen-2 Impersonator models, way too late for Hank's final Shadows concerts. I felt the Impersonator '54 was close to the mark and Hank agreed, but it was sufficiently fatter and less sharp that he adopted it for his modern sound. I also found it could do a fair rendition of Shadows tunes with a bit of knob tweaking too. But, however good the 54 is, Paul and Gary felt the goal of absolute replica of Hank's 59 Stratocaster sound still had not been achieved. Some time later I developed the Impersonator E69 and I sent specimens to Paul for evaluation. He and Gary were ecstatic as it was the closest to the goal so far. Praise flowed in from both of them until the day Gary recorded Dance On ,,, and then the bad news came. Paul described the distorted sound on strong upstrokes on the low E-6th notes and sent a sound file, sometime later Paul and I gave it the name of Torn Cone Syndrome (TCS). So a whole new challenge had emerged, one that was to eventually take another 2 years to solve and eventually culminate in the current new Magnum Opus model. I have dozens and dozens of test pickups lying around on shelves and in boxes, the wasteful and time consuming but necessary part of developing new kinds of Zero-Hum pickups at Kinman.
TCS is a mysterious distortion and has no history of attempted solution that I know about. I surmise that either other pickup makers are not aware of it or they failed to find a solution and therefore stayed silent about it, with the same outcome. I tore a lot of hair out over TCS, I was so frustrated because no single design modification made a significant impact on it and I was slowly coming around to believing there was no solution ... at least for Strat pickups ... it was part n parcel of overly simple Strat pickup coil geometry and magnetic circuit and to change that required a bigger pickup cover. Well, it's pretty obvious that idea didn't gain much traction because my pickup would necessarily have to fit into standard pickguard openings.
I was on the verge of giving up when I decided to try one last time with a combinations of ideas .... and lucky I did, because right away I detected a significant improvement. It spurred me on and over the next week and with a dozen or so more test pickups and exhaustive testing I finally arrived at the definitive solution. It consists of modified coil geometry, very different coil specifications (wire gauge, di-electric coating, precisely controlled winding speed, feed rate and tension, my special Alnico rod magnets, high performing silicon-steel magnetic components that facilitate a unique magnetic circuit .... and a few other things. It took the combination of all these elements to solve a 60 year flaw with Strat pickups. It's no bloody wonder a solution has not been found before. The pickup industry thinks a week or two of development is all that is worth investing in new pickups, they balk at months .... and years are not entertained in the least.
But my belief didn't automatically mean Paul and Gary would agree. I had to face the ultimate test, a recording of Dance On ... so I sent a few specimen pickups to Paul and waited with bated breath. The rest is history, happy history and a big load off my shoulders and a huge sigh of relief. My engineering draftsman and I set about designing all the component parts with CAD software, tolerances were specified and the parts were proved with computer modelling and then the e-files were sent to our various suppliers for quantity production. The last of the special parts will arrive within 2 weeks and then production in earnest of the acclaimed Magnum Opus Strat pickups will begin.
The Magnum Opus produces a better twang from the low wound strings than the Impersonator E69 as well as minimizing TCS.
This story is typical of what goes into the development of my Zero-Hum pickups, and yet my prices are only marginally more expensive than non-noiseless Strat copy pickup that have no technology to speak of and less than a quarter the number of components and require one sixth the time to make. My accountant thinks I'm mad for not charging more and I told him it's all the market is accustomed to paying for what many perceive as a humble pickup. He said "
What's so humble about Kinman pickups?" I just sighed and lamented
"it's just the way it is". And I think about the relatively high prices of guitars, amplifiers, even good quality leads and of course the ubiquitous effects pedals and the large number of them many guitar players own. It seems to me that many don't value the difference a great pickup makes and yet it's the start of the signal chain and often plays a make-or-break role in the sonic outcome. All the Fx pedals in the world can't restore sonic character that is not there in the first place. Still I am thankful for the consistent and steady flow of incoming orders from appreciative guitar players all around the world.
This story no doubt will enlighten folks that criticize me and my products, thankfully there are only a few that simply have no idea of the lengths I go to create new products that simply didn't exist before. It's called inventive progress and without it we would forever be stuck in the dark ages. Thanks for listening, I hope you enjoyed.
PS these new pickups can be ordered by clicking on the BUY button on this page
https://kinman.com/model-products.php?pid=4&products=Stratocaster&linegroup=yes&modelid=20&model=Hank+Marvin+sets&group=Named%20SetsCK