.

Did he mention that Alembic came up with the idea of using lower impedance PU's with flatter frequency response and then using active electronics to add a variable resonant peak something like 40 years ago? 

I think they can't get enough winds on a printed coil for a traditional high impedance PU. 
 
And I think trying to convince guitar players that something is both new and different but still sounds like something traditional is going to be a tough sell. 
 
But I'd actually be very interested if they had bass PU's that weren't EQ'd to try and sound like a traditional PU and had flatter and more extended frequency response.

mike_mccue
I remember being aware of these before I knew much about Alembic:
 
http://www2.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/Features/en-us/Les-Pauls-Favorite-Les-Paul.aspx
 
I don't really know which came first.

 
http://www.hagstrom.org.uk/Hagstrom_future_is_past.htm#Bi-Sonic
 

The Bi-Sonic Pickups - now being remade by (and documented on) the Hammon Engineering Website

Quote: "Jack Casady & Phil Lesh did not play Starfires because there was a lot of room for Alembic electronics; they played them because of the combination of the original Hagstrom made single coil pickups (not the ones in the reissue Starfires) and the flexibility and sound of the flatwound Pyramid Gold strings which made the short scale Starfires sound huge.

Ron Wickersham devised a method for testing frequency response of magnetic pickup coils in around 1969, and found that the Hagstrom/Starfire pickups had the widest frequency response of anything he had tested. So Ron was documenting what Jack & Phil's ears had already told them.

Owsley "Bear" Stanley had already discovered that the pickups could be hot rodded by adding a second magnet, and so the sound was born. Ron further improved things by building transistorized emitter followers onto the pickups, thus creating what were probably the first active pickups (yes, 1969)".

 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alembic_Inc
 

History[edit]

The company was founded by Owsley Stanley as a workshop in the rehearsal room of the Grateful Dead in Novato, California, near San Francisco, to help improve the entire sound chain for the band's live recordings, from instruments to PA. Soon the group was active in sound recording, modifying and repairing guitars and basses, and PA systems. By 1970 Alembic was incorporated with three equal shareholders: Ron Wickersham, an electronics expert who came in from Ampex; Rick Turner, a guitarist turned luthier; and Bob Matthews, a recording engineer.[1]

Inspired by the wide frequency response of the Hagstrom Bi-sonic pickups installed in Phil Lesh and Jack Casady's basses, Ron Wickersham and Rick Turner designed low-impedance pickups and electronics with greater bandwidth than the high-impedance pickups typical in electric guitars and basses of the time. To boost the low output of these pickups, Wickersham designed an active onboard preamp.[citation needed] Turner referred to this process as "Alembicizing".[1]

The company's first instrument was a bass guitar, made in 1972 for Jack Casady.[1] This bass incorporated a massive electronics suite, with state variable filtering capability,

 
 

 
I sort of remember when "active", became all the rage... and I also remember later when it became not all the rage.

For bass players, I thought it's been pretty popular since the beginning, though there have always been those who preferred passive. I used to be a passive guy, but discovered that was mostly due to early experiences with some fairly poor and/or uninspiring active stuff. 

mike_mccue
For the sake of curiosity, was the appreciation of wider frequency response, as referred to in the quote, of lower frequencies (dropping the bomb) or higher frequencies, or both?
 

 
I'm not actually sure, but I'm thinking extended low frequencies might have been of limited use in 1969, given the general state of technology at that time.
 

 
I've read about small appliances that generate test tones and procedures for measuring pickup frequency response but I can't find any links of the articles, that I have read, so that I can share. There are a lot of hits for search on Google but I didn't recognize anything I was familiar with.

They keep whatever they did a secret, but you might find this site interesting:
 
http://www.aqdi.com/cgi-bin/database.cgi

Heard and played them at last NAMM - really nice.