Active V.S. Passive pickups...

 The question "should I use active or passive pickups on my guitar?" has been asked by many guitar players around the world. But what exactly IS an active pickup? Well, it's a passive pickup with some kind of electronic booster in it. That's it!
 So, the question really is "Do I need extra boost and output?". In the late 70s, when active pickups were first used on guitars, the amps and pedals needed a bit more pickup output to be fully over driven and saturated. Now, things have radically changed tonewize. The analog and digital modelling pedals/amps/preamps can turn a tele guitar to a metal beast and an lp guitar to a twang master... Therefore, pickups can make a difference in your guitar's tone but the amps you're using will make a much more dramatic and radical change/improvement.
 Still, sometimes we don't want to alter our rig and we only want to make some subtle changes to out guitar's tone. That's when we start looking for a new pickup(set). So, "active or passive"? -It depends...
 In this case, a friend bought a nice schecter atx blackjack guitar. The guitar is great in terms of build quality and playability. It has mahogany neck and body and a set of active Duncan Blackouts.
 These active pickups tend to be more bright and powerful than emgs but that's not always the case. In this case, the active pickups made the atx sound muddy and harsh, lacked highs and their output was over driving the amp(egnater MOD50 module head) too hard...
  First, we tried to reduce the tone capacitor value a bit to allow more highs to flow through the guitar. That made some difference but the output was still too high. Then, we changed the pickups and put a passive set on the atx. A dimarzio Air Classic pickup was placed in the bridge position and a dimarzio Air Norton in the neck position. What an improvement! The guitar became toneful with the right amount of output, highs and lows. There were no more farty lows and screeching highs, only sweet singing mids and a classic lp style tone! The guitar became so much more versatile than ever before. It's like the actives were restricting the guitar's tone abilities given the guitar rig we were using. Then, we put a gibson 500T in the bridge position for more output but the tone remained rich in mids and the EQ was well balanced.
 In this point, I should probably notice that the atx sounded okay with the active pickups through a low gain fender champ modified amp I has lying around. I guess that's what active pickups were made for: overdriving lower gain (tube) amps to get as much gain and saturation as possible out of them. So, at the end, it all comes down to what gear one's using and if his/her guitar's pickups can match that gear.

Here are some project pics: