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 40 minutes 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!