Sound is in your hands, yes, to a certain extent. But when I played an NS M-85 at the Chicago Music Exchange I did not hear a bisonic. It sounded okay and would have probably sounded very good with flatwounds and a proper set-up, but it definitely did not sound very similar to my '66 Starfire with the bisonic in the same position. In fact, the solid body Guyatone shortscale with the Novak BS/DS in the same position sounded MUCH closer. I side with Curtis Novak on this one when he says "a pickup is a sensor and its job is to sense the strings vibration and send that signal to an output device, your amp. The objective of any sensor is to have the greatest dynamic range, and fidelity to capture what ever it is designed to sense. You can then decide, as the end user, to accentuate or eliminate elements at your discretion. But you can not post process and accentuate what your sensor did not pickup!" In other words your hands can't make frequencies come out of your speaker if your instrument or the pickup isn't producing or picking them up to begin with. After all, it has been said time and time again that the original Hagstrom Bisonic pickups were so special because of their fantastic wide frequency response. Of course, this whole line of thinking doesn't argue the fact that a player's technique or skill can still be communicated through a sub-par instrument or pickup... if Jack plays a cheap, poorly built/designed bass, I'm sure he'll still sound like Jack. On the same token, pickups like bisonics with wide frequency response definitely won't make a "bad" bassist sound "good". If anything they'll expose the errors or sloppiness in his technique. And just like that I'm rambling again.
But regardless of all that yakety-yak, still can't wait to check out the new SFB-II when it comes out!