Idiotic question about silent circuit...

[whitestrat]

There's been talk about people hearing a difference, but from what I can tell it's just the psychological effect of a quieter signal that people are reacting to. There's no real tonal change.

If this is true, then it's a really amazing system. If this patented? Otherwise I can't imagine why no one else is doing it. I can't wait to get mine to try...

How is it set usually out of the box?

 

[beej]

for a HSS Silo Spec, only the 2 Singles are connected, and I only have to tweak the switch to match the humbucker noise level?

For the HSS Silo Spec, the neck pickup is the only single coil used on it's own. So the Silent Circuit is only engaged on the neck pickup, not on the 'bucker or parallel positions (which are inherently noise canceling on their own).

If this is true, then it's a really amazing system. If this patented? Otherwise I can't imagine why no one else is doing it.

Yes, it is patented. See here.

It's a very clever design. The upside is, there's no effect from the dummy coil on the pickups. The downside is, the noise produced by the coil doesn't match all pickups, it has to be somewhat tuned. I find it works great with a lot of pickups, and there's a few that don't work so well (they have to be in the sweet spot for inductance/resistance).

It's tuned properly at the factory. I've yet to see a case where an adjustment was an improvement.