I have to say, I was in a huge heavy metal phase before and thought this would be the pickup to get. The absolute highest output pickup available in dimarzio's product line. I installed it with another dimarzio single coil in the neck and was immediately disappointed.

The cleans were nothing to write home about, really bland and had no headroom. Which, wasn't suprising, this was not the intention of this pickup being created. It was meant for high gain distortion. I found it quite disappointing.

It was gainy yes. Was it clear and tight? No. It had a lot of distortion but felt like it didn't know where to go with it and was just all over the place sound-wise. It was literally just pure distortion with no clarity, just blazing...gain. I tried this though a boosted JCM800 and didn't like it whatsoever. the X2N was definitely a 'modern' sound if i had to reference it to something. It just seemed very bland, and not tight. Complex chords are indistuingshable, it was a thick sounding pickup but it still had some highs, sterile-like highs. I did not try it tapped, I gave up on it after a few weeks trying to get it to sound good for me and it did not.

I wouldn't recommend this pickup for anything, maybe some garage-noise band? If you play downtuned guitar I think you'd get nothing but a mess. A lot of metal pickups nowadays have improved, they're clear, yet tight under high gain and still dynamic. And this pickup delivers none of that. Yes metal is generally lots of gain and mad riffage, but there's still dynamics to it, I believe so anyway.