Active humbuckers have a distinctive sound - powerful, clean, open sounding, with excellent harmonic overtones and very tight lows. The down side for many players is that they also sound cold, have limited dynamics and run out of headroom when played hard. And of course, they need batteries. In 2006 DiMarzio took a close look at the most popular active neck and bridge humbuckers to see if they could capture all of the good qualities and eliminate the disadvantages. The D Activator neck and bridge models are the result. The DP220 pickup has the same loud yet clean sound as the active humbuckers players are familiar with, and killer harmonics. They also respond instantly to hard or light pick attack. In a word, the DP220 pickups rock. And they don"t need batteries. Recommended For: Bridge Tech Talk: An interesting fact about the most popular active bridge pickups is that they aren"t incredibly loud. Instead, they have a strong, focused attack that hits the amp very hard and makes them feel more powerful than they actually spec out to be. This is an important characteristic that DiMarzio needed to capture with the D Activator bridge pickup. They also wanted to avoid the limiting effect that can occur with active pickups when they are played hard. This pickup is passive with a lot of headroom, and it responds quickly and accurately to changes in pick attack. A hard pick attack doesn"t cause the signal to flatten out, and picking more softly or rolling the volume control down lets the sound clean up naturally. Like all passive pickups, D Activators require controls with a minimum value of 250Kohms. 500K is the standard all around value, and our 1Megohm tone control is best for long cable runs.