PSA: Fake HB1s on Reverb

mavuser

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I played a NS T-Bird in sam ash. the pickups sounded great, both of them. small LB-1s. Top quality craftsmanship on the one I played as well, I should add. the shape and size of the guitar just wasnt for me.
 

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Yeah, but I have other guitars with bridge pickups that do the oomph! thing. The NS bridge p'up jangles, which is why I like it. I do get that Fender opted for a mismatched LB-1 set…but for me it works. I like Tele neck pickups too, and those are arguably "mismatched" to the bridge p'ups. Whatever…

-Dave-

Again, Fender didn't "opt" for anything. They bought a random set off ebay and never did any due diligence. When I brought it to their attention, it caused a lot of consternation in Scottsdale. One of the guys at NH told me he was throwing them in the trashcan until he was told to stop. Another told me that they couldn't figure out why they sounded so bad. If Fender had not sold Guild, it would have been corrected.
Glad you can work with it, but there was a reason that Fender's demo videos all had fuzzboxes on them.
 

JohnW63

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Probably costs a lot to stop the assembly line and redo the part that makes the flawed pickup, which also stops the production of the guitars, while they wait for the new pickups to be stock in enough quantities to not run out. You also have to get a proper pickup to match in the first place, that everybody agrees on.
 

fronobulax

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It's odd that CMG is unwilling to change this. I mean what's the problem, the factory in Korea winds whatever CMG orders from them.
Ralf

Pure speculation on my part but with a change like this there would be a public relations or logistics issue. The change would, for practical purposes, create two different versions of the guitar. If CMG pretends the change is not important enough to update the nomenclature then they have to deal with folks who played one version, ended up buying the other and are mad at the company because they didn't get what they expected. If they do introduce a "new version" then they have to do so in a way that their dealers do not suffer serious financial losses if the old version lingers on the shelves. There is also the logistics issue - until they know all of the old version have been sold they have to track and manage two item types in inventory and deal with two different possibilities for repair and warranty. If I have a V1 and need a PU repaired, replaced, and Guild has forgotten about the difference and ends up upgrading me to V2 I am going to be unhappy and maybe even in lawsuit territory.

I suspect that these are things FMIC had seen before and knew how to handle but that is not the case for CMG. If they don't change, these are all avoidable problems.
 
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