Tone caps - To change or not to change

MikeM

Check it out

I'm quite shocked to say the least!! Guess who will be buying random caps and doing some recording from now on. I always thought this was bull.

Btw if you're at the open chords part and have thought wtf, wait till he plays the higher up the neck ?

Gearhead

It is not all bull but most of us will not hear the difference Mike; it takes pretty good pc audio to hear it.
The part that John does not explain is whether he measured the leakage and capacitance of the caps before using them; with those paper caps you really don't know what you are testing. Also, some of the difference might be down to capacitance variations.
Why would you buy randomly instead of going for the type you like?

AlanRatcliffe

He does test the caps in a later video (also adding a ceramic into the mix), and all measure within 5% tolerance. The vids do show a noticeable difference between the types, even with the recording setup and YouTube video compression. Granted, not many people have decent speakers and soundcards on their Internet browsing machines, but there is still enough there that you can tell there is a difference and that it's worth investigating yourself.

I'm not big on having any tone controls at all, and it would have been nice had he showed the difference between no tone and with a tone control on at 10.

singemonkey

What struck me was how few of them (to my ears and speakers) made any difference. What I noticed was that the antique yellow whatsit sounded really good, the fish, fish bowl, whatever it was called, sounded really different (although did it sound better? Hard to say), and the original Epiphone cap sounded rubbish.

The others sounded much of a muchness to these ignorant ears.

Wizard

My ears and/or sound system also failed me.
Heard very little difference.
The original Epi sounded a little brighter.

AlanRatcliffe

Funny - admittedly my Internet machine's system is pretty good (ESI Waveterminal 192M & KRKV8 monitors), but the differences are clear enough that I would have thought that they would show with any semi-decent sound system.

He has 160K mp3 file versions on his site - perhaps try download and compare.
Here they are: http://www.planetz.com/?p=714

I tried doing a blind test and the Mallory and the Orange Drops ended up tops. Mallory for distorted tones and Orange Drops for cleans.

Gearhead

Alan Ratcliffe wrote I tried doing a blind test and the Mallory and the Orange Drops ended up tops

? how surprising ?

~~How do you do this test?~~ Found that following the link, sorry Alan.

I will go and try to play the stuff on my hifi system. Now I hope I will wind up with smaller caps than those drops, they will never fit into cavities on my guits...

AlanRatcliffe

I converted to Wav and used WinABX to compare: http://www.kikeg.arrakis.es/winabx/

Wizard

I built a valve shortwave receiver in the 70's ... and some of the capacitor's I used were those green blob things ?

MikeM

Wow. I am running onboard sound with a pair of HD555s and the differences were pretty evident ?

[deleted]

No way................. ???

I am now a believer... Its not even a slight difference...

No way.................