The brick-red colored connectors that Alembic uses are Molex connectors with 0.10 spacing. The current generation of these connectors are called C-Grid, but it's not worth trying to buy the male connector. The one piece you need is probably 25 cents, but you'll probably have a hard time buying less than hundreds of them. Even then, they won't be very usable as this kind of connector is typically soldered onto a PC board. That's what they're for - connecting a cable assembly to a PC board in a reliable and disconnectable fashion. Just cut the end off, but (if you've got enough cable), leave a couple of inches on the connector, so you could resplice the connector on in the future. But really, just cut it off and don't worry about it.
The mini coax connector is also still available, but will be very expensive and hard to work with. It's also designed to go from a cable to a PC board and this one is designed to do so minimizing signal loss (it's normally used for radio frequency signals and is overkill for audio).
The story with SC-1 is that this is part of a very unusual electronics setup. It's a low-output single coil pickup, designed to run into a preamp before leaving the bass. A single coil pickup on it's own can hum like mad, so a clever guy like Leo Fender decided to fix the problem by winding the single-coil pickups on a Jazz Bass with reverse winding and reverse polarity (the magnets are upside down). When both pickups are on, the trick pickups create in-phase audio but cancel any hum. If your Jazz pickups are reverse-wound, reverse polarity, then connecting them up in parallel will get rid of the hum. But if the two pickups are identical, then reversing the wiring will get rid of the hum but put the pickups out-of-phase and all the bass will go away too. If you have a traditional Jazz Bass, you probably never noticed this, but the bridge pickup is wider than the neck one - this way you never mess up and put two identical pickups in the same bass. But if you have a Fender that was made in Mexico, they actually use two identical pickups (they're exactly the same size too) and it will hum when both pickups are on.
Leo was clever, but Ron W. was working under different constraints. The Alembics have always been ultimate performance, price is no object. So instead of creating a pair of trick pickups that get rid of hum when they're both on, but hum when you're only using one, he made a system where both pickups are true single coils and they still don't hum.
A Series Bass has two regular single coil pickups that are carefully designed and matched to each other, but there's also a hum cancelling coil that normally sits in between the pickups, flush at the surface of the bass. This coil is just a coil of wire with no magnets, so it can't sense the motion of the strings. The only thing the middle pickup of a Series bass can hear is HUM! This noise-only signal is subtracted from the regular pickup outputs and you get perfect single-coil sound with no hum, even when only one pickup is on (although there are actually two coils working!).
The Series electronics are really wild. To maintain perfect signal quality, the output from the pickups go straight to independent preamps. And so does the hum coil - so a Series bass has a dedicated preamp that just amplifies noise, so it can be subtracted out!
Even though the Series electronics were designed in the 70's, it already embodied a lot of stuff that became popular many years later like 18V power (it's actually higher from the power supply) and more.
David Fung
