I disagree on that last point. Virtually every pickup maker in the world including Fender (the Custom Shop, that is...) have been studying those amazing examples from history for decades. They're doing the reverse engineering thing so to speak and they're quite good at it. They know how to reproduce those tones and they are doing so on a regular basis. And then they also offer slight improvements as well. The only thing generic about today's best after market vintage style pickups is that they are consistent but what's wrong with that if they are consistently good? I think the reason we see so many mediocre OEM pickups has to do with marketing. Why install your best at first when you can later sell 2 or more sets of pups for every guitar by offering optional upgrades or after market upgrades?

A good reasonably priced tube amp is the Super Champ XD...less than $300 and some incredibly sweet tones.. 15 Watts, 10" speaker and lots of fx.

Yes and they are making a Bazzilion of replicated sounding pickups no character. Nothing like a scatter wound pickup that you find that speaks to you. Many of the rewires I do for customers I tell the to think out of the box get away from the typical kid moder pickups look for your sound.

So what I am understanding from this is that you feel any pickup that sounds like any other pickup is undesirable no matter how good or bad it sounds and that the whole point of pickups is solely about being original. Great tone doesn't have any value regardless of how great it is unless it is different and unique.

???

Sorry, I didn't realize you were a vendor. My bad. It's all making sense to me now. Nuf sed.

Oh, and yes, pencils are the last ones to touch the paper so they had the ultimately responsibility for misspelled words. It was their job to proof read before it went to hard copy.