i wonder if they help the fragile harmonics in the crystal lattice?
:lol:
And if they get chipped or scratched or the neck relief increases and some of them get pushed out a bit and you have to dress them, then you have problems.
Plus, their basic technical reason for their superiority is nonesense. They say its because of increased density, but quartz is about 1/4 as dense as nickel silver. Quartz is probably a very good vibration transmission medium for the same reason as diamond: Macromolecular (lots of phonons!). They also reckon that you want to stop vibration transmission through the fret (with said density), and so isolate the string from the guitar, which, even if they can do that (rather dubious that something with such low actual mass so strongly coupled to the guitar can) would surely not be desirable tonally? Plus the fact that cystals transmit vibration extremely well suggests that the exact opposite of what they are saying is true; they might actually pass more energy into the guitar, which will resonate more which would support their claims (for the wrong reasons!).
Also metal cant wear them down like water cant wear down rock. They will wear, the hardness of quartz isnt that much higher than nickel and steel, its just it will take longer and your strings will wear out faster instead.
No doubt they sound different though. Whether that different is in fact better, who can say.
Quartz is piezoelectric too: wire up your fretboard and every frets a pickup! (they missed a selling point there :lol:)
