One more thing... Saying something like "The classic Gibson PAF sound" is very misleading. Gibson wasn't a factory of elusive genius-types with secrets kept under lock and key in a vault somewhere never to be looked upon by pedestrians. They used what they had. They had a box of magnets. Some were A2, A3, A4, A5, etc. Not much rhyme or reason. Old Gibson pickups are all over the place. It's more than common to pull the pickups from old Gibsons and find one pickup with an A5 magnet and the other with an A2 or A3, each with a seemingly arbitrary gauss strength. The winds are in the same ballpark but never dead-on consistent. Some were amazing, some just ok. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. They surely didn't expect people to tear their pickups apart and try to recreate them. If you notice, Seymour Duncan has several different models of PAF style pickups. You'll also notice that they tend to be modeled after certain player's guitars. Like Slash & Billy Gibbons. What happened is they found pickups that everyone could agree had something special and recreated them with painstaking detail. Same can be said for the boutique companies like Lollar, Fralin, etc.
The reason why we go after this sound is not due to the pickups but what all of the legendary players did with them in the glory days of rock 'n' roll. Another reason I'm excited about the Mullinax take on humbuckers. Glad somebody is finally thinking forward as opposed to trying to keep recreating the past.
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