cryo cooled pickups and parts

[halfintegerspin]

i know callaham cryo cools pickups and parts, but it seems to me to be a gimmick...  i know people swear by the pickups, but those are special would fralins which probably sound great anyways.  any thoughts? comparisons? 

 

[Tonar8352]

I have used pickups directly from Fralin and then used Fralins from Callaham.  The Callaham custom Fralin is my standard choice for all my personal strats.  The have a smoothness that the stock ones do not have and the harmonics are not as harsh.  I think they live up to the hype.

 

[halfintegerspin]

ok, so i guess i dont understand what physically takes place at low temps that when you heat it back up to RT doesnt get reversed... i know magnetic properties change when you drop temps, but they go right back when you raise the temp... ie: superconducting magnets... does this mean i can dunk any old pickup into LN2 and make it better?  hmm... maybe i will try that out...

 

[V-P]

I don't know if it's the freezing part that does it but they sure sound great...

 

[Patrick from Davis]

Well, whether it is true or not, here is wikipedia's blurb on it.  It seems to me that it is similar in concept to annealing, and that does work wonders on metals. 
Patrick

 

[disaster]

Callaham's site mentions that they will cryo treat any parts you supply.  If you're really interested buy 2 same make/model pickups & send 1 to Callaham for a treatment, then do a post-cryo A/B compare.  I don't remember what the price to cryo treat a pickup was, but given the price of his cryo-treated Fralins it can't be that bad.  You'll probably have to wait a while though.......

 

[callaway]

Yeah, that wiki article is kind of wonky. Wikipedia is pretty cool, but sometimes you can tell it's just as poorly-written and not quite right as the majority of everything else available online.

Anyway, I'll take a crack at it... the cryo treatments lower the kinetic energy in the atoms, letting the molecules that make up the metals and ferrites in the pickups line up to achieve a near perfect structure. The reason they are not in a perfect structure to begin with is that at some point they were molten materials, in which the molecules are not aligned at all. As the liquid cools to form solid ferrites, metals, etc., they get stuck together before perfectly aligning. Once cryo treated, the molecules won't have enough energy to break into random alignment again until it is molten... at which point your pickup would be useless anyway 

As far as whether the cryo treatment makes a difference, well I don't have personal experience. I have read about world-class horn players having their horns treated; of course, you also hear about these pickups being great as well. It seems like such a small difference---or rather, a difference on such a small scale---that it wouldn't be noticeable. But I bet it is. It's amazing that differences on a particle physics level can be discerned by musicians, but they can. We'd pretty much all agree that tube distortion is better than solid-state, right? The difference is in the way that electrons flow.

 

[Kublai]

If your pups sound like crap, you can have the cryogenically frozen until a cure is found?


Sorry...too much beer.

 

[tfarny]

Wow, this is interesting, I had assumed cryo was complete marketing hype, but I knew Callaham was high quality stuff. Science is cool!

 

[dbw]

Hmm.  Well I sure wouldn't pay Callaham out the ass for it.  Liquid nitrogen is cheap, as long as you have a container that can hold it.  Just dip your stuff in.  Cryo-treated strings are supposed to last longer... you could try it with one or two strings an see if they actually hold up better.

 

[GoDrex]

Hmm.  Well I sure wouldn't pay Callaham out the ass for it.  Liquid nitrogen is cheap, as long as you have a container that can hold it.  Just dip your stuff in.  Cryo-treated strings are supposed to last longer... you could try it with one or two strings an see if they actually hold up better.

I'm not sure if you can do it that way. I think some materials can be damaged by going from room temp straight into the liquid - - but I could be wrong.

 

[nathan a]

Hmm.  Well I sure wouldn't pay Callaham out the ass for it.  Liquid nitrogen is cheap, as long as you have a container that can hold it.  Just dip your stuff in.  Cryo-treated strings are supposed to last longer... you could try it with one or two strings an see if they actually hold up better.

I'm not sure if you can do it that way. I think some materials can be damaged by going from room temp straight into the liquid - - but I could be wrong.

I'm pretty sure that is the case.... they get brittle, I believe.

 

[Superlizard]

I dipped my JTM45 in a big ol' vat of liquid nitrogen... that's why it sounds so good.  Then I threw my geetars in there too along with my speaker and pedals, and jumped in myself for good measure.

 

[GoDrex]

I dipped my JTM45 in a big ol' vat of liquid nitrogen... that's why it sounds so good.  Then I threw my geetars in there too along with my speaker and pedals, and jumped in myself for good measure.

don't you use the H/SRV set from Callaham?

 

[Superlizard]

don't you use the H/SRV set from Callaham?

Yep.

 

[halfintegerspin]

so yeah, i dont completely believe that wiki article.  to me annealing makes total sense in how it effects materials... you raise the temperature thus allowing the atoms to move, then upon cooling they fall to a more stable configuration.  lowering the temperature will only contract the material while cold.  this still leaves the same structure (the same packing and electronic structure)  when they are at room temperature just with less kinetic energy... 

and as for when the materials were melted, bulk materials lose their magnetic properties at high temperatures such that when they cool the magnetic field aligns to any external field (an example is hot lava tracking the magnetic evolution of earth over millions of years... pretty cool really)... room temperature is plenty low in temperature that the packing of atoms wont rearrange, you just need to charge the magnetic field which is really just an electron thing... i just cant see why lowering the temperature would do anything since the nuclei are sort of besides the point... the electrons are what matter... right?

i guess there is no easy answer?  but playing with LN2 is good fun... 

 

[Mr. E.]

my Callaham H/SRV set came in; just waiting for a few odds & ends for that guitar.  :toothy10:

-erik

 

[halfintegerspin]

they are defiantly worth the small upcharge to try them out.  let me know how you like them... though from others comments, i am sure they will sing.

 

[GoDrex]

I dipped my JTM45 in a big ol' vat of liquid nitrogen... that's why it sounds so good.  Then I threw my geetars in there too along with my speaker and pedals, and jumped in myself for good measure.

I decided to try this and here's what happened:

Sounds really bad now.  :laughing7:

 

[Superlizard]

I dipped my JTM45 in a big ol' vat of liquid nitrogen... that's why it sounds so good.  Then I threw my geetars in there too along with my speaker and pedals, and jumped in myself for good measure.

I decided to try this and here's what happened:

Sounds really bad now.  :laughing7:

You've gotta wipe the blue off when ya take it out.

And if you keep it in there too long, you'll get shrinkage.