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Pickups-Cheap? or Junk?

The last thing I want to do is take anything away from the folks on here who sell quality pickups. But I stumbled across some of this stuff on ebay and wondered if anyone has ever tried it. Is it Cheap? Junk? or both?

6 string pickup pre-wired with volume and tone controls. "Noiseless" uh huh.....lmao.....sorry, just thinking, does that mean "silent". But for $7.50 including shipping, I can't buy the pots and caps at Rad Shack for that.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Noiseless-Good-Balance-Guitar-Magnetic-Acoustic...

And the next contestant, for $2.75 including shipping from hong kong:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Single-Coil-Pickup-Electric-Guitar-Bass-6-Strin...

I have to ask, when $20 can get a hand full of pickups to play with, are they worth messing around with? or complete junk? I mean, for the price, you could "let the blue smoke out" and not care.

Which brings up another point, I understand all electronics need blue smoke inside of them in order to work. Some time back, I let the blue smoke out of a pre-amp that I wired wrong and now it doesn't work. Can you buy after market blue smoke? and if so, how do you get it "back in"??? :P

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Permalink Reply by LittleBigOne on August 11, 2010 at 5:57am

...just a word to say these eBay stores are even blocked from accessing from my country because
of not reliable stores ; So now, you know :-)

Josh Gayou (SmokehouseGuitars) said:

For the second pickup, I wouldn't recommend buying that unless you wanted to learn a valuable lesson about life in general :)

Josh

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Permalink Reply by Tim Fleischer on August 11, 2010 at 8:26am

The bottom line in my opinion is you get what you pay for. I personally don't want to spend $75 - $100 for a pickup for a CBG. I've used the ebay $7.99 assemblies and for the most part they sound pretty good. I've had to make adjustments on a couple (solder fixes, new 1/4" jacks, etc) but they are quiet and they have a good sound...I'm sure not as good as a seymore duncan or some others. And they usually take about 2 weeks for U.S. delivery. You've got to keep in mind...it's $7.99.

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Permalink Reply by Josh Gayou (SmokehouseGuitars) on August 11, 2010 at 8:34am

All depends on the CBG you're making. Sometimes a cheap pickup is exactly what's called for because you're going for grit rather than studio time :)

Tim Fleischer said:

The bottom line in my opinion is you get what you pay for. I personally don't want to spend $75 - $100 for a pickup for a CBG. I've used the ebay $7.99 assemblies and for the most part they sound pretty good. I've had to make adjustments on a couple (solder fixes, new 1/4" jacks, etc) but they are quiet and they have a good sound...I'm sure not as good as a seymore duncan or some others. And they usually take about 2 weeks for U.S. delivery. You've got to keep in mind...it's $7.99.