I was at the Fishman booth for Gary Hoey's demo of the Fluence pickups at NAMM on Saturday. Very nice tone out of them, but they are active pickups and require that you use one of their battery packs. (I'm not sure this is true since the sales guys didn't know if they required the battery pack or could run on 9-volt batteries.)
The battery pack that they sell is embedded in a bridge spring rout cover so the size is pretty standard, however you'll have to have a rout cover to use them. They are charged batteries though, not replaceable, and they charge through a standard USB connector/adapter. Fishman is saying that, once charged, the pickups will last through 250 hours of use before needing to be charged again. Nice, if you've got a roadie who can keep track of when you last charged your pickups.
They are not copper-wire wound pickups, more along the lines of the Fishman acoustic pickups in functionality. (I couldn't get any of the sales guys to tell me how they work so I may buy a set just to take them apart and figure that out.)
On the up side though, they sound incredible. Super clean, great definition. The single coils are really clean, similar to the 50's reissues from Fender. There are two very usable voicings for each of the pickups and the second voicing for the single coils was just a bit gritty like the Fender Tex-Mex, but cleaned up nicely with a small nudge down on the guitar volume.
The humbuckers first voice was similar to the '59 PAF. Midrange-y with a good bottom end and not too much bite. The second voicing was identical (to my ear) to the SD JB. Very nice with a high-gain amp.
I was thinking about picking up a set of these to check them out. I'm still not totally sold since I'm not one for active pickups, but I'm not totally against them either.
