The famous Darkstar Laredo is on eBay.
It doesn't bother me at all that some love the Dark Star, what irritated me is the fervor about it being the perfect replacement for just about anything. It was the perfect P replacement, the perfect Tele Bass humbucker replacement, the perfect Rick replacement et al. No matter that these pickups sounded very different from each other, the Dark Star was said to be everything they sounded like and more. I heard ad nauseam about how the DS is such a full range sound. That's why I don't like it. What makes various pickups interesting is that they're not full range, they each have their own distinctive frequency ranges, peaks, valleys, etc.
Interesting analysis! I've never played a Dark Star equipped bass, but it seems like the whole point was to tap into the magic of the early bass sounds of Jack Casady and Phil Lesh, who were not only using Bisonic-equipped Guilds but heavily modifid proto-Alembic electronics, the whole point of which was to use filters to emphasize certain frequencies. So I don't think the point was the full-range sound by itself, it was to mold that full range sound with filters (whether lo-, band-, or high-pass). That seemed to fly over a lot of people's heads...I wonder too (and this is just a thought) how much of the "magic" of Dark Stars is in the name - even if you aren't familiar with the Grateful Dead, it's kind of mysterious and magical sounding...
I think that part of the appeal was that they look good, and very different from the P/J/MM/soapbar pickups that you see all the time.
I'm with Dave on this. I think these pickups work best for the hollowbody Guild basses such as the Starfire's or early M basses that were fully hollow. I had an early JS bass with an original Bi Sonic in the neck position but to me it did not sound as good as with the hollowbody bass.
That's a good point as well - I've got a late-'60s Starfire with just the neck Bisonic that sounds great, and an early-'70s M85-II solid-body fretless with Guild Sludgebuckers (at least I think that's what we're calling them) - been considering swapping them out for Dark Stars, but maybe I'll keep that as-is - that's the lazy-inertia method that I favor anyway, though I still need someone to look at it because the bridge pickup by itself hums...