Post by antigua on Sept 25, 2016 18:13:52 GMT -5
This post is just going to be specs, as I have not put them in a guitar just yet.
These pickups are special for boasting AlNiCo 3 pole pieces. Only a handful of pickup makers offer this as a choice for Strat pickups, including Fender on occasion.
The whole set Tonerider costs $100. Fender Pure Vintage sets can be bought for as low as $100, but that seems to vary from seller to seller. Guitar Fetish undercuts them all with $70 sets. A set of SSL-1s cost $160, so given the competition, I'd cross SD off right away. The Tonderiders are also the only ones to feature cloth tape around the coil, which reduces the incidence of receiving DOA pickups, and accidentally destroying the coil during installation.
Tonerider Surfari Bridge
DC Resistance: 6.45K
Inductance: 2.969 H
Resonant Peak: 9.26 Hz
Calculated C: 79pF (99-20)
Coil width: 0.56" (with single layer cloth tape)
Tonerider Surfari Middle
DC Resistance: 6.15K
Inductance: 2.747 H
Resonant Peak: 9.70 kHz
Calculated C: 78pF (98-20)
Coil width: 0.55" (with single layer cloth tape)
Tonerider Surfari Neck
DC Resistance: 5.97K
Inductance: 2.561 H
Resonant Peak: 9.81 kHz
Calculated C: 83pF (103-20)
Coil width: 0.54" (with single layer cloth tape)
The nice thing about Tonerider is that, unlike most pickup makers, they provide inductance measures for their pickups, and my own measurements came close, to within 100mH of their specs.
These pickups appear to have a fairly low capacitance, around 80pF, and that makes the unloaded resonant peak fairly high at 9 to 10kHz, where as the SSL-1, which also has an inductance around 2.6H, but a higher capacitance, calculated close to 105pF, has an unloaded resonant peak in the 8 to 9kHz range.
That might make it seems as though these should sound brighter than the SSL-1s, but once you add cable capacitance to the equation, which can be close to 500pF, and is represented with a 470pF dummy load in these tests, the 25% difference in capacitance becomes a 5% difference in capacitance, and the loaded frequency peaks are in the area of 3.6 to 3.7kHz for both the SSL-1 and the Surfaris. In other words, thanks to the guitar cable, the inductance does most of the talking.
Another interesting difference the AlNiCo 3 poles of these pickups appears to make is the lower Q factor and increased damping at the resonance. With these AlNiCo 3 pickups, the loaded Q shows 1.5, while 1.8 has been typical with AlNiCo 5 Strat pickups. The SSL-1 and Fender PV 65, for example, both have 15dB rises in amplitude at the unloaded resonance, where as the Surfaris have only a 12dB rise in amplitude at the unloaded resonance.
Here is a demonstration of the difference. I measured three pickups with AlNiCo 5 poles; a Fat 50, a Texas Special and a DiMarzio True Velvet, and all show peaks with a higher voltage, at or about 15dB over the baseline, and a steep Q factor:
I also did a comparison of AlNiCo pole pieces a couple months ago:
This plot was made before I had Ken Willmott's integrator circuit working, so it has a diagonal voltage by frequency bias, but if you look at the red line in the middle, that's AlNiCo 5, and the faint gray like at the bottom of the pile is AlNiCo 3, and you can see that it has a duller peak than the AlNiCo 3. The reason appears to be that AlNiCo 3 has a higher permeability than AlNiCo 5, leading to higher inductance as well as eddy losses. AlNiCo 3 also has a lower conductivity than AlNiCo 5, and that by itself should increase the Q, rather than decrease it, but since the Q factor is obviously lower, and that eddy current losses are caused by a combination of permeability and conductivity, that leaves permeability to blame, by process of elimination.
Long story short, the AlNiCo 3 should sound a bit less nasal, since the bandwidth is wider and the Q is lower. If you have AlNiCo 5 pickups already installed in a Strat, and you roll the tone control back to 9, and then adjust the amplifier's treble to taste, you should approximate the AlNiCo 3 difference pretty closely.
Setup details:
Bode plots are made with a Velleman PCSGU250 and the supplied probes in 10x mode, with the function generator feeding a driver coil of 0.48mH, placed on top of the pickup and driven with 2Vpp. The pickup is connected to an integrator circuit, designed by Ken Willmottkenwillmott.com/blog/, with a Velleman 10x probe, and fed back into the Velleman PCSGU250. I measured the probes' capacitance at 20pF, so that amount is subtracted from the capacitance calculation. The "loaded" tests have exactly 470k ohms and 200pF capacitance across the pickup.
The inductance and Q measurements are made with an Extech 380193 in "SER" series mode, and the mean value between the 1kHz and 120Hz modes is recorded. The capacitance value is derived from the inductance and measured resonant peak.
Magnets are tested with a Spin Doctor ER gravitastech.weebly.com/spin-doctor-er.html