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Is there a way to determine what magnets are in a pick up? Aside from resistance, are there any other parameters that can be measured that may give an indication of what a pick up might sound like?

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Brian

You never know what you are capable of until you actually try.

https://www.howardguitarsdelaware.com/

In my experience the resistance and inductance values are only a start . Within a genre however they tend to be a good indicator.
Most pickup vendors thankfully have sound bytes now so it helps . There is of course the influence of the instrument as well.

In my experience "hotter" pickups tend to lose a bit of clarity for the increased gain .

Aside from the obvious differences between alnico and ceramic and short of having an engineer with the proper test equipment to determine the grade of a particular magnet, no. Best to check the manufacturers specs.



Inductance, capacitance and gauss can all be measured and will determine what effect the pickup will have on the signal received from the strings . How they react with each other and resistance to affect the sound, I haven't a clue.

You should be able to get more help at http://music-electronics-forum.com/f11/. I've gotten some good info from the guys who post on that forum.

not sure if there is a scientific(clear) answer to this, thus all the crazy high priced pickups and associated mumbo-jumbo. i do believe that AlNiCo polepieces cannot be magnetized with a magnetic field strength that rivals ceramic or "rare earth" metals such as neodymium....but when magnetic pull becomes too stong then string vibration is dampened...that may be why vintage pickups are considered holy grail: they are just weak. but i like to assign much more blame on electric guitar sound to the amplifier and it's settings, not the guitar. for sure humbuckers sound a lot different than single coils, independent of DC resistance values, and i can't answer as to why. but a shocking number of guitar players have great equipment but still no idea how to extract a decent tone from it, so really, that is ground zero

LOL

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Mike

The only thing nescessary for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.

lower impedance= more musical sound.
higher impedance=richer sound.

Now we can sit and split hairs about the definition of musical sound.... and what constitutes richer sound.

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"Act your age, not your shoe size" - Prince

yup. subjective, undefinable, unquantifiable terms that have no valuable meaning...