Output on Les Paul pickups?

[Neil Ogilvie]

I was checking the impedance on my LP pickups today and was more than suprised with the result I got.

Now maybe I was doing something wrong, but the meter only registered 8 Ohms of impedance. I thought these things were meant to be high output? Or am I messing up somewhere?

 

[acorec]

I was checking the impedance on my LP pickups today and was more than suprised with the result I got.

Now maybe I was doing something wrong, but the meter only registered 8 Ohms of impedance. I thought these things were meant to be high output? Or am I messing up somewhere?

You cannot do a direct ohm measure of an inductor (coil). The measure of resistance is called impedance and changes with frequency. You would need a pretty expensive meter to measure it.

 

[boingoman]

Did you have your meter set correctly? Or if it is digital was the reading in Kohms? A humbucker will read somewhere around 8k DC resistance.

 

[Neil Ogilvie]

Good point - Why did I not think of that??

I was using http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Impedance.html as my main resource because I was too lazy to dig the books up....... That'll teach me.

Does anyone have any idea what impedance modern les paul pickups should be?

 

[boingoman]

A modern humbucker that measures around 10k of DC resistance will have something like 100kohms output impedance.