Just watched the "New Pickups for the Blues Strat" video and some thoughts.
If ever there was a firm that is the very doyen of "end time capitalism" it's modern Fender. Consider this, you are in effect paying someone 3 grand and northwards to spend hours making something that is perfect when the guitar you actually want was made by a total "lash up and make do operation" run by an eccentric mostly populated by eccentric staff. Leo Fender's company was notorious for is budgetary bodging of production runs and he would happily chuck random parts into both guitars and amps to fulfil orders. Tolerances on pots values, by electronic standards, were literally tolerant of anything that came close meaning that, any given pre CBS Strat is almost a random collection of parts solely defined by the shape of the instrument.
This wasn't some slick corporate operation, it was the unwanted child of a bit of a genius and its workforce as pointed out, were often as eccentric as their boss. Someone I worked with for almost decade, their main guitar was a 63 pre CBS Strat and I always thought it "looked different" to modern Strats and not simply because of the smaller headstock. This was confirmed to me when the luthier who built my Strat's body pointed out "Oh modern pickguards wont fit, you have to fettle them, it's only a couple of mm's difference however, it makes a big difference on the bottom curve and horn of a Strat.
Listening to those three Strats, the pre CBS sounds blatantly like it's somehow "bandwidth limited" and that sounds exactly as does my old colleagues pre CBS Strat. The other two have way more top end and loads more bottom end, the pre CBS is all midrange and that's why it sounds so damned good. That leads us into a huge chicken and the egg conundrum that, unless we invent time travel, we are never going to truly understand. The contemporaneous recording systems we all hear those Strats record on, were in themselves, pretty much all midrange. That means we have no real "control group" whereby we can say. "Oh those pups always sounded like that"; or "They've quite obviously mellowed as has the guitar over the intervening years".
That is the essence of rock n roll, whereby, making things technically better doesn't necessarily make them right. I have several lovely guitars and yet, my very first proper guitar an old 70s Japanese double cut copy made from boxwood, that weighs literally sod all, has a bolt on neck and P90 Dog Ears that are so microphonic you could record vocals through them, is still the best lead guitar I own and sustains like something Nigel Tufnel would wet himself over. For years I thought this was just some random collection that happens to sound right and then, about a year ago, I watched a video with Guthrie Govan and surprise surprise, his signature guitars are made from boxwood with a thin maple cap. That is, one of the world's leading guitarists who could spec anything he wants , chooses a "tone wood" most purists would turn their nose up as "cheap tat". Go figure eh?
