1.The winders have no exposure OR
2. They don't have the ear to produce good sounding pickups
Though it maybe tempting to buy local or Asian pickups because of their price or the pogi points of a 'specially' made pickup for you, there is more to consider. Below is an excerpt that I lifted from Tonequest Report that describes the effort in the design of the Gibson Classic 57 pickup by JT Ribiloff.
JTRibiloff was a key member of Gibson's R&D team when the '57 Classic was developed in cooperation with Tom Holmes.
JT Ribiloff:
"By the time I was 21 I had owned over 400 guitars. I've been a guitar freak since I was 14 years old, I'm 44 now, and I'm sure I have had over a 1,000 guitars. I grew up in southern California, so we had access to a lot of guitars and I've owned lots of vintage Les Pauls, SG's, Specials and ES175's. When we started to develop the 57 Classic, I had quite a few vintage pickups at my fingertips, and George Gruhn was very generous in that he would let us go in and pull guitars and hold on to them overnight so that we could find those that really had the ultimate tone. There were significant inconsistencies among all of those old instruments, because you have to remember that these factories existed primarily to make money, and the way to make money was to keep material and labor costs low and build as efficiently as possible. They were trying to use whatever was commercially available, but in the music industry, the quantities of usage are very, very low compared to the automobile industry, for example and that's where the inconsistencies in material came in. The rod stock for the pole pieces in PAF's was basically low carbon steel, and I had different pole pieces analyzed to find out what types of carbon compound and grade of steel they used, because that's a big part of getting that authentic sound. They used plain enamel 42 gauge wire, and the very first PAF's basically used the same magnets that were being used for the P90s at the time. The magnets didn't really change dimensionally until around 1961, but the magnet material in the early PAF's did vary between Alnico II and Alnico IV.
The 57 Classic was specifically aimed at making 'middle of the road' version of the PAF pickup that would sound equally great played through a Fender reverb amp or a Marshall 100watt Super Lead. The final testing came down ot just playing the pickup through a variety of guitar bodies and amps. And it's not just about how the pickup sounds, but also how it feels... At the sae time the Classics were being developed, we were also trying to develop the Historic Les Paul, so we were listinging to a lot of different vintage guitars. There were some vintage pickups that didn't sound good at all, and it wasn't so much due ot the way they were originally made, but the way they had aged. Enamel wire becomes brittle with time, and as it gets brittle, you can get little breaks in it, and the pickup actually stops working on inductance and starts working on capacitance. Some pickups with these breaks can become warmer sounding, and others become really bright.
The final testing of the Classic took place in multiples of different guitars because what I wanted was a good, rudimentary pickup that worked equally well in a broad range of instruments, and I'm sure that was the goal they had i mind with the original PAF's were designed. Any time I tried to duplicate the extremes that we heard in vintage pickups, one style of playing always seemed to suffer. A pickup that sounded particularly great through a Marshall amp for really aggressive kinds of rock music would sound way too dark through a Fender. Then, if you made the pickup sound super sweet, it would sould like a buzz saw ripping through your skull played through a really bright Marshall. Gibson had just started potting pickups prior to the time we were working on the Classic, and they had never wax-potted pickups prior to 1988-89. Fortunately, a the time we were working on the Classics we were also going through a complete re-tooling, so all of the usual restraints and resistance to change had been removed."
