I have recently put a set of Cold Sweats in one of my guitars and I thought I'd share my thoughts with you ...
The guitar is a Fender Showmaster; a basswood superstrat with a maple set-neck, rosewood fret board and floating trem. The guitar doesn't have an awful lot of resonance and can suck out the high and low freqencies of pickups making it quite fussy as to which ones will work well with it. I chose the Cold Sweats, not because I wanted a particular sound but because I wanted a set of pickups that would suit this guitar and make up for its tonal limitations, which so far these seem to do.
The neck pickup: I've started with the neck because everyone raves on about it, and with some justification. In both series and parallel modes, the neck is clear, articulate and chimes like a bell. It's great both with lots of gain for leads and clean for arpegios, etc. The difference between series and parallel modes isn't huge with series being a little hotter and fuller, while parallel is slightly lower output and slightly scooped in the mids. In both modes, the tone is dynamic and uncompressed with a quick, percussive attack.
The bridge pickup: in their haste to sing the praises of the CS neck, most people seem to forget about the bridge pickup - I don't know why; it's a great pick up. It's not as high output or as compressed as maybe you'd expect from a ceramic pickup but still has a hard rock / metal flavour albeit in a more friendly way - for example, Andy Taylor's tone on this clip (using a Les Paul Custom with Dirty Fingers pickups I believe) exemplifies the sort of sound I'm getting out of it:
http://youtu.be/5K_OKHtrtBYIt's a great pickup, with a little bit of compression (in a good way, and no way as much as in many other ceramic powered pickups, such as the Duncan Distortion for example) and goes a long way to filling the gaps at the top and bottom end of the Showmaster's tonal range but I would wonder if it might be too much in a bright guitar?
