Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow 7 Set

These pick ups are weird. I had a set that came with a schecter Keith Meroow Signature guitar and the neck pick up just completly died after a couple of months. No guitar tech I brought it to knew how to fix it and they all said the problem was something happening within the pick up itself, not the wiring of the guitar. I bought a new set and now there's other strange problems going on. One weird thing that happens is that the guitar pickups seem to pick up the drum kit in rehearsal and feed the drum sounds it picks up through the guitar channel, which when using a hi gain sound for playing metal or rock music becomes a serious issue with no obvious fix in sight. Another werid thing that they do is that I have to set the input gain of my audio interface to 0 when recording with these pickups as if i turn up any more tan 0 (the lowest input gain setting I can do on my focusrite interface) the guitar begins to clip. this means that I cannot experiment with lower input gain levels for experimenting with tones and trying to find a sweet spot as the pickups just wont allow it. My other guitars dont have any of these problems/ when they work right, they sound great, but they've broken my heart a few times over the past year. With a pick up set costing 260 euro, you'd hope that you wouldn't have any problems considering this premium price tag. I got onto fishman fluence on their website and when I asked them could they fix my pickup they said no, and to just get my broken one replaced under warranty with who I bought it from. I dunno about anyone else, but I really dont want to have to send away my pickups to a different country to get them replaced instead of just bringing my guitar to a local tech to get it fixed. Hassle

I wanted some active pickups to try and update the tone of my Ibanez Universe and so I thought I should try these as Keith Merrow is, in my opinion, one of the best of the modern “tone chasers”.
From previous experience I definitely also prefer the more “80’s” tone of the Classic/Open Core pickups than the Modern variety, and knowing these Merrow pickups are same/similar to the Classic sealed the deal.
I think they qualify as the best active pickups I’ve had, but so far I’m not convinced they are better than the passive Dimarzio Evo bridge/Blaze neck pickups that they replaced. Bridge Voice 1 is surprisingly low/mid output, which I don’t find useful for a 7 string guitar, I’ve hardwired it to the more aggressive Voice 2.
Voice 1 on the neck pickup yields the better, more natural clean tone, so I’ve stuck with that. Voice 3 (single coil) is quite nice, although it is absolutely quieter than humbucking mode, though I’m sure I read Fishman said there is no volume drop…?
I like them, I’ll stick with them for a while, but after many attempts with active pickups I realise I am just a passive pickup kind of guy.
I also bought a 6 string set to install into my Ibanez S - hopefully the results are as good or better than with the Universe!
One push/pull volume pot is faulty, so I’ve marked them down to 4*