Donlis DSL51 Covered A5 Humbucker Quick Test

[stratotarts]

I got a pair of "Quality Nickel silver Alnico 5 lp guitar pickup PAF style with Nickel cover baseplate wax potted" pickups from Donlis for about US$51/pair. The part number is DLS51. They have four leads plus a shield. The plots are so typical that I can omit comment except to say that the bridge-neck balance is more subtle than some sets that have a much higher inductance bridge pickup. Here, the bridge is about 6H to the 4.7H neck. It is evident that the covers are indeed the nickel silver that is claimed. There have been a few Donlis analyses before, but I believe they were without covers. The external parts seem to be of a very high quality but I am not disassembling this particular set to see what's inside because I intend to play them. I am always impressed by a fair price, but often it is not attached to something I actually want. In this case, I have found exactly the type of pickups I am looking for, and didn't have to shell out for them. There are some new independent winders that are beginning to churn out similar stuff at a decent price but they either didn't make or didn't stock these. So I bit and waited a few weeks for the shipment from China.

The "A2" in the above plot is a typo, it's an A5 pickup.
It's interesting to compare with some other pickup, unfortunately I don't have a lot of data on covered pickups so I had to compare with the GFS Retrotron, which has a partial cover:

[antigua]

Thanks for the review. $51 isn't bad, but considering the BYO Blizzard of '59 goes for $70 and is more of a straight forward PAF clone with braided cloth wire and likely to arrive more quickly in the mail. Also I see that it's not offerred on Donis' website www.donlis.com/ (which must be new), so it looks like availability might be an issue.

The inductance values of 5.9H bridge and 4.7H neck are good spec point, they should perform like any comparable set from a more costly US based maker, and that's worth noting because some pickup tested from China have tended to deviate quite a bit from their own listed specs, but more problematically, deviate from industry standard ranges. 

[stratotarts]

Some items in the Donlis store must be in short supply... I originally wanted the A2 set but they were not on there at the time. The thing about BYO is that I am not in the USA, so shipping is not as simple an option. Some US sellers have learned to streamline shipping to Canada, but some not. There are exchange rates, taxes, duties and shipping costs and sometimes the customs broker will even charge, with a corresponding tax on their services! Sometimes it can be slow too... up to 2 weeks. So buying from China is overall easier for me.