As Seymour Duncan's website mentioned, these pickup are meant to pair with the new Pegasus and Nazgul pickups. which are aim at players who enjoy more modern kind of extreme / progressive guitar tone.
I had installed them onto my old ibanez RG 7 strings which loaded with loaded with a pair DiMarzios (Air Norton / Steve Speical). The original pickup is pretty good already and satisfied me in both live and recording situations for so long.
But still I can regard this new pickup replacement is a upgrade!
the Sentient neck pickup have all the sparkle and warm i liked from the old pickups, still it has more power, which mean a smooth and fluid sound while heavily distorted. which paired so nicely with the Pegasus bridge.
One thing that bugs me a lot with the old pickup is how the sound while coil split. A lot of humbucker pick up gives you the option to coil tap as a function but does not sound good at all. but this one is different, the splitted single coil sound is spot on, sounded bright with a lot of chime in it, while it still retains a lot of warmth in it, which is good for broken chords.
i would highly recommend these pickup to anybody haven't tried them yet