UNDER THE HOOD
What spaghetti and magic is lurking inside the 24-08? PRS’s COO, Jack Higginbotham, joins us to find out
Inside the relatively small rear cavity there’s certainly plenty of wire. It’s all neatly done, though, and the circuit and TCI ‘S’ pickups appear the same as the previous SE Custom 24-08 and the SE Paul’s Guitar we’ve looked at previously. Indeed, Jack Higginbotham confirms: “Yes, this is the exact pickup, electronic/switching rig found in those guitars.”
We have Alpha ‘Made in Korea’ pots with a nominal value of 500kohms, the tone cap being .033 microfarads and the treble bleed cap 180 picofarads – standard PRS values. There’s an additional resistor (820k) placed from the input lug to ground on the volume, which means the pickups ‘see’ an approximately 310k volume pot, which, in theory, will subtly reduce the high-end compared with a 500k pot without that resistor. And when the coil-split is introduced, voicing the slug coil of each humbucker, the screw coil
“We imbed the PRS DNA and give the guitarist a very highvalue pickup system” Jack Higginbotham
isn’t just dumped to ground, it’s completely removed from the circuit. There also seems to be some added ‘tuning’ of the bridge pickup via an extra-long braided shield on the bridge pickup only, which, again in theory, will very slightly attenuate the higher-end via its capacitive effect.
Measured at output the bridge pickup here has a DCR of 8.31kohms in humbucker mode and 4.11k in single-coil mode; the neck is 7.88k and 3.99k. Each pickup is labelled with a product code plus ‘Paul’ clearly as the pickup name – these are versions 10.2021.
Typically, four-conductor humbuckers have an additional fifth, usually bare, wire that grounds the metalwork; here we just have four conductors (one from each end of each coil). “Our method of single-coil switching without the fifth wire is part of our TCI methodology,” Jack tells us. “This omission helps remove one of the variables when tuning inductance. I think the fun thing to mention about these pickups is that we develop them using commonly available components found in Asia, but we build the recipe in such a way we can imbed the PRS DNA and give the guitarist a very high-value pickup system in our SE Series. Our partnership with Cor-Tek on the guitars and PSE on the pickups has allowed us to take the development of the SE Series in some interesting directions.”
Use those controls because they’re the key to the breadth and range of sounds… This Standard punches above its price
Not only do they impress, but they keep us playing way past our allocated testing time. To say this lowly Standard punches above its price is a serious understatement.
Straight out of its gigbag the tuning is extremely stable, too, and once the vibrato and strings are settled in all we can say is that we wish all guitars at this price point stayed and played in tune like this.
Verdict
Once upon a time, many of us would look down on ‘offshore’ lines, at best being cheap and cheerful, though not a patch on the real thing. When PRS’s SE line launched in 2001 it was little different, but in partnering with Cor-Tek in Indonesia there seems to have been a considerable change that’s vividly demonstrated by the SE Silver Sky. We get the same vibe here with this lowly SE Standard 24-08. It’s faultlessly made and functions perfectly, but it’s the ‘08’ switching that turns it from being an also-ran into a serious workhorse for any player who needs to cover a lot of ground from one instrument. Yes, there’s an element of it being a Jack-of-alltrades, master of none, but for the serious practising, performing and recording musician, it’s £600 well spent and £300 less expensive than the SE Custom 24-08, which, when we reviewed it last year, got a Guitarist Gold 10/10 rating. A new standard for the mass production guitar? It’s a yes from us.