HRW Mystique

[MartyGrass]

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/articles/features/is_it_cool_or_not_cryogenically_frozen_gear_explained-108422

 

I can't find any recent references to cryo treatment of pickups, but 20+ years ago they were a thing.

[nuke]

Yeah the cryo thing was a fad. They did strings too, and fret wire, and probably anything else one could dunk in a dewar full of liquid nitrogen.  Liquid nitrogen is pretty cheap actually. My wife's company gets it in the big, self-venting, metal cryo-tanks that are about 5 feet tall for their processes. It's much cheaper than gas cylinders if you're using a lot of nitrogen. 

You can still buy cryo treated guitar strings, fretwire, and vacuum tubes and who knows what else. Like I said, if you can dunk it, it's been sold as cryo treated. I wouldn't be surprised if someone sells cryo-treated picks. 

There are changes in metal crystalline and grain structure when they're dunked in liquid nitrogen. I'm not a metallurgist. I'm not sure what effect it would have on alnico. I do know that alnico magnets are used in sensing devices at both high and low temperatures, because they perform well at temperature extremes. That's in the data sheets from magnet manufacturers. 

 

Edited 9 hours ago by nuke

[TalismanRich]

I think we've got it narrowed down.

They are:

Dewound Schallers that are overwound, with overcharged,  degaused cryogenically enhanced Alnico V magnets which have been replaced with Alnico 2,  with unbalanced coils that are consistently wound.

I'm glad we've finally cracked the DaVinci code of pickups!

[Gitfiddler]

3 hours ago, TalismanRich said:

I think we've got it narrowed down.

They are:

Dewound Schallers that are overwound, with overcharged,  degaused cryogenically enhanced Alnico V magnets which have been replaced with Alnico 2,  with unbalanced coils that are consistently wound.

I'm glad we've finally cracked the DaVinci code of pickups!

Brilliant synopsis, but you left out one last nugget...

HRW's sound a lot like Schallers, only lowered a tiny bit into the pickup ring.   😗

 

[nuke]

To be fair, Schaller made a lot of good pickups. They also made an enormous variety of them too. I think might still be in the pickup business, but they didn't get on board the retail market for end-user pickup swaps. That's driven a lot of growth in the market. I know back in the early 80's when I was a teen, not many of us even knew where the pickups in our guitars came from or who made them. It was sort of the EVH thing that got people talking about DiMarzio and their Distortion Plus. Prior to that, I don't think end-users really considered pickups other than what the manufacturer of the guitar made in house, or bought depending on whether they wanted to invest money in the machinery to make them, or just buy them. 

Schaller was in the parts business, bridges, hardware, brackets, tuning machines and pickups were just another item in the line catalog. They'd wind up whatever the customer wanted too. Even Gibson had some pickups made by Schaller and many components of pickups they bought from Schaller for their own production. 

It's pretty simple to make a pickup. The factory Heritage was housed in, certainly made Gibson pickups going to way back when, including the much coveted original PAF's. 

Heck, a couple of years ago I bought a pair of brand new humbuckers from China, for $14 a pair, including shipping to my house. Honestly, I can't even buy the raw materials and wire for that. They were OK too, nothing special, certainly worked just fine, as advertised. Even included the springs and mounting screws. 

Like I said, if I didn't like them so much, I'd open those HRW's right up for a look.