Passives can quite easily do tight sounds, it's just a matter of properly matching pickups to the right body wood and in the case of the studio, having an engineer that knows his shit.
Also helps to have a great guitarist on board, and I can understand it probably sounds shit when 9 out of 10 guitarists are horrible anyway.
This
I used EMGs for years (dont worry, this isnt an 'I saw the light, youre all wrong' story', just saying that so you know that I know them well) and now have BKs in all my guitars.
The downside: you really have to match the pickup to the guitar carefully. I've had the worst sounds I've ever had from BKs because they let a lot of the guitar through; the pickup and the guitar really strongly interact with each other. Its easy to throw in a pickup and write it off if it doesnt work (have done this before), but I've later heard the same pickup in another guitar and its been stellar. (I probably wouldnt get to do this if I wasnt a guitar tech; it happened with nailbombs in particular; I tried them in one of my guitars, it sucked, I was asked to install them in a customers guitar and it slayed, now ceramic nailbombs are one of my main pickups, in certain guitars).
EMGs will be very consistent from guitar to guitar. Theres some variation, but you know basically what youre going to get, because the pickup overrides the guitar to a large extent.
The upside; when you get that match, it can deliver the precision and tightness all day along (I've heard guitar and BK combos that are much tighter than EMG equiped guitars, both as played by me at least), but with the added advantage of more open sound to let complex chords breathe, and more dynamics.
The dynamics part, lack of compression, is where the player comes in. I've heard people play stuff on their EMG equiped guitars and its all even and consistent. Then I've heard them switch to one of my BK guitars and the subtley different ways they're playing different sections of a song come accross really clearly. You have to adapt to that, but its also there for you to use. Bit of a double edged sword, but only if youre dealing with a poor guitarist.
At the end of the day its all taste, and I like EMGs plenty, and they have the advantage that you know what youre going to get with them, but good passives *can* do it better, imo, if you get the right pickup/guitar combination.
Anyway, yeah, amps: lots of valid objections to the validity of the comparison here, but as they sound there, I liked the CLX first and by quite a long way, the 6534 second and nitrox 3rd. They had, or sounded like they could have in the case of the nitrox, a healthy balance of clarity and thickness and thunk. The others I was either ambivilent about or thought were outright dreadfull. The cobra, randall and H&K stood out to me as especially bad.
I didnt think the VH4, powerball or dual rec were terribly fair. I know all those amps pretty well (I have a PB 1), and the VH4 was similar to what I expect of it, but it can be a lot less woofy and wooly than that, the PB was dialled in to sound pretty much as bad as a PB can and the dual rec was clearly at low volume, and any fool know, you need to open those up quite a lot for them to not sound shit.
