PRS 245 pickups measurements

[ecmalmo]

As an addendum to my thread about winding new pickups for my PRS guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/9747/pickup-troubles I thought I'd do some measurements on the stock pickups. The guitar is a 2007 PRS SC245, made in Maryland, USA.

PRS "245" pickups

Note! This is the made in US versions of these pickups, not the import "245-S". I don't know how they are different.
I don't have the full integrator and scope yet but hopefully this can still be useful. Measurements were made with a UT612 LCR meter and the unloaded peak was calculated from the L and C values.


Neck:

DCR:9kOhm

L @ 100Hz:5.8H

C @ 100kHz: 134pF

Peak field strength: 320G (screw side)

Calculated unloaded peak: 5.7kHz



Bridge:

DCR: 9.6kOhm

L @ 100Hz:6.5H

C @ 100kHz: 114pF

Peak field strength: 380G (screw side)

Calculated unloaded peak: 5.8kHz



My thoughts
These pickups have some in my mind strange design choices. They have brushed nickel covers and a braided lead wire, but a brass baseplate. So some "vintage" appointments but not going all the way. The inductance is too high for a PAF style, probably in the ballpark of a Super Distortion, but they don't use a big ceramic magnet like in the SD (Gauss reading is in the ballpark of an AlNiCo 5). The sound is consequently muffled, dark and "muddy" especially on the neck pickup which almost makes you sounds like you are using a fuzz with the tone rolled down when playing with distortion. The output of the bridge pickup I would classify as "medium" so it does not really compensate for it's dark sound with a strong output to drive the amp.

[stratotarts]

Under the brushed nickel plating on the covers, is it nickel silver or brass material?

[ecmalmo]

Nov 17, 2021 8:03:24 GMT -5 stratotarts said:

Under the brushed nickel plating on the covers, is it nickel silver or brass material?

I don't know. Is there a way to find out without scraping them? They seem to be filled with something like hot glue or silicone, and I don't want to take them apart since people still pay good money for original PRS USA pickups... In case I'll want to sell the guitar in the future it's a good idea to keep them around.

[antigua]

If you have an LCR meter that measures Q factor, the Q factor at 1kHz might be interesting. I haven't totally correlated Q @ 1kHz with cover types, but something like this gives me cause to investigate. I can compare the Q's of some of my covers to whatever reading you get. 

My guess is that it's real brushed nickel, because I think that would be easier to pull off than to chrome plate a brass cover, and then brush the chrome.  Some people can tell nickel and chrome apart by the color alone, but I can't.

Thanks for the values, these seem typical of stock import pickups, they get some details vintage correct, but then blow off others, but more than anything else, a tendency to wind them hot. I've seen the same trend in Epiphones versus Gibsons, Duncan Design verus Seymour Duncan, and the lower priced import Zemaitii I've bought, not to mention the Fender single coils with the steel pole pieces, where the steel pole pieces alone increase the inductance by around 50%. That's half the reason I've bought so many pickups, is to get pickups that tend to sound better clean than those stock pickups tend to, and so my collection of pickups runs light on "high output" offerings, and most of those I've tested came stock in an import guitar of one sort or another. 

In the case of PRS and Duncan Design, the American versions are not generally as hot, apples to apples, and so I wonder if it's 100% intentional, or if it's not a way of making their import products ever so slightly inferior, in order to retain the market differentiation of their higher priced American made models. 

[ecmalmo]

I’m getting a Q of 2.12 at 1kHz for the neck pickup.

These are not the import version, they were made by PRS in Maryland, but I believe the import version has similar DCR values at least.

[antigua]

Nov 17, 2021 15:53:24 GMT -5 ecmalmo said:

I’m getting a Q of 2.12 at 1kHz for the neck pickup.

These are not the import version, they were made by PRS in Maryland, but I believe the import version has similar DCR values at least.

I found a post I did about Q factor and covers guitarnuts2.proboards.com/thread/8970/detecting-brass-nickel-silver-meter , unfortunately 2.12 is a lot higher than any value I recorded, so I can't make a correlation. 

I looked at Reverb to see if I could find a similar pickup, I didn't see any but I did notice that nearly all PRS pickups have brass base plates, and I think until DiMarzio started getting serous about vintage correctness, it appears that they used brass base plate exclusively also. The two companies are in the same region of the US, and I've sometimes wondered if they exchange notes.  I did a Q factor experiment a few years ago with nickel silver and brass, and the difference in peak amplitude was well under 1dBV, so from a sound stand point it's a triviality, but since we're the kind of people who take pickups out and look at them, it's nice to see quality all the way around.