DiMarzio D Activator Bridge Review (DP220): High-Gain Pickup
I have never liked active pickups. Yes, there was a period when I was 16 or 17 years old when I thought, “Wow, these covered humbuckers look so different. They’re really cool.” But once I started playing guitar and gradually developed a sense of what tone actually meant to me, I honestly stopped finding anything particularly fascinating about them.
Yes, they are incredibly quiet when you are not playing. Yes, they are fantastic for palm-muted riffs under ultra-high gain. But when it comes to dynamic playing and phrasing, or manipulating your tone with the volume pot, their rather lifeless response has simply never been my thing. So if you are not playing in a band plays very hard, ultra heavy and intense metal without the Dynamics, you won’t possibly need those anyway.
With that in mind, an advertisement I read years ago for a new DiMarzio model did absolutely nothing for me. The whole idea, as I remember it, was essentially summed up by saying that these were passive pickups designed to deliver the tone of active pickups. I think that description kept me away from the D Activator for years.
Then, much later, curiosity started to get the better of me. Maybe I had been too prejudiced against it. Maybe the D Activator wasn't actually just a tonal copy of an active pickup. Maybe it had something more to offer. Let's find out...
Test Guitar
I have been using that pickup on my Jackson Soloist SLX DX. You can check my detailed review here.
Evaluation
The official info about D-Activator is:
“The D Activator Bridge has an enriched harmonic quality and the notes want to sing. Both the D Activator Neck and Bridge pickups were designed to eliminate the sterile edginess commonly associated with active pickups. The D Activator Bridge pickup is about 25% louder than the D Activator Neck. Since we were developing both pickups as a set from the ground up, we adjusted the volume levels on the pickups so they are balanced. That way when you switch from the neck to the bridge, you don’t hear a drop in volume — also a frequent problem with active pickups — and they don’t use batteries.
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 we needed to capture with the D Activator bridge pickup. We also wanted to avoid the limiting effect that can occur with active pickups when they are played hard. Our 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 Activator pickups 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.”
Want to see the measurements, right here!
Dimarzio D-Activator Bridge DP220
Magnet – Big Ceramic
Advertised DCR: 11.410 K Ohm (Series)
Measured DCR: 11.482 K Ohm (Series)
Measured DCR: 5.5028 K Ohm (Screw/South Coil)
Measured DCR: 5.9839 K Ohm (Slug/North Coil)
Inductance @100Hz: 6.4261H (Series), Q:0.3517
Inductance @100Hz: 2.8165 H (Screw Coil)
Inductance @100Hz: 2.7993 H (Slug Coil)
Measured C@100KHz: 141pF
Calculated Self Resonance Peak: 5.2873KHz
Calculated Loaded Res. Freq w/470pF: 2.54 KHz
Output: 470mV
EQ (B/M/T) – 6/6/6.5 (old catalog data) – 5.5/5.5/6.5/4 (official website data)
Gauss: 500G screws, 490G slug (measured at top center of D&G pole pieces)
Patents: Dual Resonance
Ambient Measurement Temperature: 28C
Users: Blake Martin, Eddie Ojeda, John 5, Juan Juarez
As always, let’s start by examining the pickup from the outside in and evaluating what the measurements tell us. Visually, the D Activator is almost identical to the Super Distortion and the DiMarzio/IBZ models. In fact, I think it is fair to say that it is a model built on DiMarzio’s “Super” platform. With its brass baseplate and large setscrew pole pieces, it can be quite difficult to tell them apart at first glance. Internally, however, I would say it is somewhat closer to the DiMarzio/IBZ construction, mainly because it does not have the steel spacer bar found in the Super Distortion.
When we get to the measurements, we can see that although it belongs to this “Super” family, it also has some structural differences. First of all, we can say that it has the lowest DCR in this family after the Super 2 and the Steve Morse Bridge. Hence we can also classify the D Activator in another way or another family group. Rather than considering it simply another derivative of the Super platform, we could also see it as one of the early members of another DiMarzio family: the more modern humbuckers represented by models such as the Mirage, Titan, and Fusion Edge. The Igno and Satur8 could arguably be included in this group as well, despite their DCR being around 12 kΩ. In that sense, the D Activator may well be one of the first representatives of this more modern design approach in DiMarzio’s passive humbucker lineup. And this makes the model even more interesting, because despite its familiar Super-style construction, some of the design ideas behind it seem to point toward where DiMarzio would take its humbucker designs in the years that followed.
DiMarzio D Activator DP220 DiMarzio D Activator DP220 DiMarzio D Activator DP220
Anyway, the D Activator also features the dual-resonance approach, something we don’t see in the other "Super" derivatives. However, this implementation of dual resonance is somewhat different from the examples I have examined before. In pickups such as the Air Norton, Humbucker From Hell, or Evo 2, the difference between the two coils was much more pronounced. The individual inductance values of the coils were equal, while there was a very obvious difference in their DCR values. That is not really the case here. The difference in DCR between the two coils is only around 1 kΩ, and when you look at the coils themselves, the difference is much more subtle. In other words, there is nothing like the very obvious coil asymmetry we saw in the Humbucker From Hell.
Gauss values are quite high as expected.
First Impressions
When I bought the D Activator, I had very little in my head about what to expect. My main philosophy was to put my prejudices aside and simply try it. That meant ignoring everything I had mentioned in the introduction, as well as the official information about the D Activator, and starting with a clean slate.
There was another important reason for this. In one of the pickup measurements I had come across, the inductance of the D Activator was listed at around 4.5H. For my taste, 4.5H in a bridge pickup suggests a little too much brightness, and that had only reinforced my prejudice against the D Activator. So when I measured the pickup myself and got an inductance value of around 6.43H, I was honestly relieved. It was a good reminder that I should trust my own measurements and experience rather than someone else’s numbers.
Anyway, I expected the D Activator to perform better in lower tunings, so I installed it in my Jackson. I had been very happy with the HB-103 that was in the guitar before it, especially when it came to lower tunings.
Dimarzio D-Activator Bridge side view 003 Dimarzio D-Activator Bridge side view 003 Dimarzio D-Activator Bridge side view 003
The first thing I noticed was the increase in output. It was not a night-and-day difference, but it was certainly obvious. Compared to the HB-103, the D Activator sounded a little more alive, although my first impression was that it was also slightly more sterile. However, the more I played it and the more I discovered its harmonic liveliness, the less noticeable that sense of sterility became. I cannot say it disappeared completely, but once you take into account what the D Activator was designed for and the kinds of music it was intended to handle, it never became something that bothered me.
Its clarity in lower tunings is a completely different matter, though, and definitely one of the D Activator’s major strengths.
Its low-frequency response is not on the same level as pickups such as the JB or Custom 5. When doing palm-muted passages under high gain, Alnico 5 pickups can sometimes have an advantage in terms of sheer sonic volume and fullness. The D Activator is by no means bad in this respect, but it is not quite as rich and full as those pickups either.
Where I think the D Activator does better, however, is in the mids—especially compared to the Custom 5. The whole area from the low mids through the high mids is rich and lively. The low mids are, of course, nothing like a Tone Zone or an AT-1. With those pickups, this region is not only rich but also has a lot of sheer body and volume. Here, it is tighter and more focused.
The high mids, on the other hand, can definitely be considered rich. But don’t think of the D Activator as a honky pickup. What you are hearing here is that familiar DiMarzio-style mid presence that we encounter in many of their models.
Overall, I would describe the pickup as having a fairly bright voicing. That keeps it from being as ice-picky as I feared it might be, but I cannot really predict what it would sound like in a brighter guitar under standard tuning. My guess is that it could become a little more noticeable—or perhaps even a little harsh—around the 12th fret and above, particularly on the lower strings. That is only an assumption at this point, but I would be somewhat surprised if I turned out to be completely wrong.
If you are someone who uses the bridge pickup extensively in lower tunings, especially for rhythm playing and riff-oriented music, I think you may really like the D Activator. Its pick response is very fast. And because it is not excessively overwound, its dynamic response is actually quite good as well.
As I mentioned in the earlier part of the review, if part of the design idea behind the D Activator was to create something along the lines of a passive version of the classic EMG 81, thankfully, the generous amount of compression you get from an EMG 81 is not present here. Instead, there is a similar kind of tonal character, but the D Activator has a much more open and breathing quality to its response. Its reaction to the volume pot is also perfectly adequate in my opinion, especially considering that it is not an excessively overwound pickup.
Comparisons
Although this was not my primary goal, I had already made a few small comparisons with other pickups, as you may have noticed above. Overall, among the pickups I have actually tried, the one I found closest to the D Activator was the DiMarzio/IBZ. I would even go as far as calling them close relatives. To my ears, the D Activator is almost like a version of the DiMarzio/IBZ with less winding and without the dual-resonance approach. It is less fat than the DiMarzio/IBZ, but it has at least as much output. It is also noticeably clearer. I have summarized the similarities and differences in the table below.
Model | DCR | DCR South | DCR North | ~Gauss | InductanceH | Ind. South | Ind. North |
D Activator Bridge | 11,48 | 5,50 | 5,98 | 500 | 6,43 | 2,82 | 2,80 |
Dimarzio IBZ Bridge | 13,84 | 6,81 | 7,05 | 500 | 6,33 | 2,81 | 2,80 |
I have not used models such as the Fusion Edge or Titan in my own guitars, so I cannot really make a direct comparison with them based on personal experience.
The pickup I expect to come up most often as a point of comparison is, of course, the EMG 81, largely because of DiMarzio’s official description. But does the D Activator really sound like an EMG 81? That is a difficult question to answer. Yes, their resonant frequencies are close to each other—the resonant peak of the EMG 81 is centered around 2.25 kHz—and I think it is fair to talk about a certain degree of tonal similarity. But when we talk about how close one pickup is to another, we cannot base the comparison solely on tonal color. The Compression, response to picking, behavior across frequency ranges outside the resonant peak, the amount of headroom, and many other parameters all need to be taken into consideration. It is a much broader spectrum than simply asking whether two pickups sound similar.
To sum it up, I did not do a direct A/B test, and I honestly have a hard time even remembering the last time I used an EMG 81. But as far as I can recall, there is a noticeable tonal similarity between the two. Once you take the other parameters I mentioned above into account, however, I think that is where the similarity ends. So, if you are expecting a passive humbucker that will give you everything the EMG 81 has to offer, you may end up disappointed.
Dynamics, Compression and Volume Control
The D Activator is a high-output, powerful humbucker. So I think it goes without saying that it does not have the low level of compression you would expect from something in the PAF-clone category. That much is clear. However, when compared with many of its own derivatives and counterparts, I think it is fair to say that the D Activator is a relatively more open and breathing pickup, with a surprisingly good response to manipulation through the volume pot. Of course, it is not nearly as versatile in this respect as the AT-1, which I reviewed in my previous article. But as I said, when judged within its own class, I do not consider this a negative at all.
Who Is the DiMarzio D Activator For?
So, let’s get to the question of who the DiMarzio D Activator is actually for. First of all, let’s put our friends who play heavy metal in lower tunings at the front of the line. I have very little doubt that they will like it. The things they are likely to want—clarity under high gain, tight lows, and a fast response to the pick—are all there in the D Activator. Other than that, I think players who are into ’80s-style metal may also enjoy it. If you like the Duncan Distortion, I suspect there is a good chance you will like the D Activator as well.
However, players whose guitars are naturally very bright might want to think twice. In those guitars, pickups such as the AT-1, Tone Zone, or Air Zone are, in my opinion, a much better match.
Conclusion
The DiMarzio D Activator Bridge turned out to be a much more interesting pickup than I expected when I first bought it. I went into this review with a certain prejudice against anything described as an “active-sounding passive pickup,” and in the end, the D Activator did not simply prove that description right or wrong. It showed that there is more to the concept than tonal color alone.
The D Activator has a fast attack, tight and clear lows, rich mids, strong harmonic content, and a fairly open response for a high-output ceramic humbucker. It is not as full in the low end as pickups such as the JB or Custom 5, and I would be cautious about pairing it with an already bright guitar under standard tuning. But in lower tunings, especially for high-gain rhythm work and riffing, its clarity and immediate response make a very convincing combination.
It also avoids much of the compression I associate with active pickups, while retaining some of the tonal character that may remind you of an EMG 81. That makes it feel much more like a genuinely passive pickup than a passive imitation of one.
For me, the DiMarzio/IBZ remains its closest relative among the pickups I have personally tried, although the D Activator is less fat and noticeably clearer. So, after all these years, I can finally say that my old prejudice against the D Activator was probably misplaced.
Pros
· Excellent clarity and tightness in lower tunings
· Fast pick response and strong harmonic content
· Relatively open dynamics for a high-output ceramic humbucker
· Good interaction with the volume pot
· Rich and lively low-mid to high-mid response
Cons
· Not as full or fat in the low end as some Alnico 5 alternatives
· Can be a little harsh for naturally bright guitars
· Not as versatile with volume-pot manipulation as something like the AT-1
· It does not reproduce the complete playing feel and compression of an EMG 81
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