It's not subjective at all. But believe what you want, and not the facts.
Just in case you don't realize it, I design and build pickups. Ive been doing this stuff since about 1977.
When you have a humbucker that has two coils under the strings, and it's wired in series, which is the most common way to wire it, two things are going on; first, you are sampling a wider area of the strings. This gives a fuller tone, and is one reason why humbuckers are generally louder and fuller sounding than single coils.
The second thing is that you are hearing both coils added together which raises the Inductance.
If you take a Gibson PAF type humbucker, and split it to single coil mode, it wont sound like a Strat. Why? Because one coil in a PAF is about 4k, and a Strat is between 6 and 9k.
But higher resistance does mean higher output anyway. There's more to it than that.
Thats true of
some Bartolini pickups. Most of them are not single coils, but they aren't wound very hot either, because that gives you a less clear tone. The ones Willis used to use where
not single coils.
If you look at Bart Jazz bass pickups, here's what you have. The 9S Jazz pickups are single coils. That's about the only single coil bass pickup he makes. The 59J1s are split coil humbuckers. The 9W-5Js have one coil per string. He also makes a stacked pickup. One of the original Bartolini designs was having one coil per string. Most of the Classic Bass series pickups have one coil per string. This was in Bill Bartolini's two 1976 patents. All his pickups where made this way until about 1975. I own one of the first Bart/Hi-A dual coil humbuckers from 1976.
And that still has nothing to do with the subject at hand. You are talking about an atypical single coil. Not half of a humbucker.
What's "a regular double coil"? Name the pickup. Humbuckers can range from a Music Man, which is 2k, to a Kent Armstrong Music Man style pickup at 13.6K, and everything in-between.
And splitting a humbucker wont make it sound like a Bart, or a Jazz bass either.
Except he doesn't have that option. I just showed you what he wrote in his own words. You are able to bypass the preamp. He did not design the pickup. Bartolini did. Bartolini and Ibanez say it has separate coils for each string. Why would Ibanez say that and not just say it's a single coil? Why is it not Jazz bass shaped like his old pickups? It's not a single coil, it's a humbucker. They say so right on the page. He also links to Ibanez's web site for the bass. Not every players knows the technical details. He said he wanted a Jazz bass tone, he didn't tell them how to do it.
You will also notice that it doesn't hum. They also point out that it's a humbucker. But it doesn't have two coils per string, it has one. They alternate polarity, so they hum cancel.
There is also no controls on the bass to switch the pickup. Do you see a switch anywhere? It has volume, which pulls up to s witch the bass to passive mode, and a bass/treble stacked pot. No other switches.
My passive humbuckers can get that tone too.
The shape and size of the coil alters the tone. This is why a Strat pickup sounds different from a Jazzmaster, or a Jazz and a P bass.
