New Production capacitors

[Kapo_Polenton]

Alright, now that I finally got my plexi working and found out that the biggest problems were due to component failures and not my wiring, I am very interested in gutting my old Laney Pro tubes and building it into a modded fire breathing monster. Jose mod, Caswell mod, timbucktwo mod, not sure which one yet. All I know is that it sounds anemic. As it is, its a waste of the iron right now, a PTP is def in order.

Anyway, out of the new production caps, what are the difference between the Sozo, the mallory, and the Orange drop caps tonewise? I know the sozos to me sound full and fat as I have them in my Plexi. How are the orange drops? Is a cap still a cap where toneshaping is concerned? I suspect you amp builders would have some perspective on this.. Wild Bill?

[nonreverb]

There are definitely diffierences between coupling caps. There are four terms which get used most often when grading caps: Neutrality, dynamics, speed and transparency.
Transparancy is basically how the signal passes through the cap or it's impeding qualities. Neutrality is how a cap will colour the sound after the signal passes through it. Dynamics is the range of frequencies that can pass through the cap. Speed is the rate the cap can react to the signal.
Do you need to have perfect cap performance in a guitar amp? Not likely but decent caps will make a difference in the overall tone. There's no sense buying Hovland caps at over $10 each when they're not required. Although some might argue otherwise. Orange drops are a good choice IMO and they're a decent price. The Mallories are good as well. As for the Sozo, I've never used them so I can't comment. Hope this helps...I'm sure others can chime in with more info:smile:


Alright, now that I finally got my plexi working and found out that the biggest problems were due to component failures and not my wiring, I am very interested in gutting my old Laney Pro tubes and building it into a modded fire breathing monster. Jose mod, Caswell mod, timbucktwo mod, not sure which one yet. All I know is that it sounds anemic. As it is, its a waste of the iron right now, a PTP is def in order.

Anyway, out of the new production caps, what are the difference between the Sozo, the mallory, and the Orange drop caps tonewise? I know the sozos to me sound full and fat as I have them in my Plexi. How are the orange drops? Is a cap still a cap where toneshaping is concerned? I suspect you amp builders would have some perspective on this.. Wild Bill?

[Wild Bill]

Alright, now that I finally got my plexi working and found out that the biggest problems were due to component failures and not my wiring, I am very interested in gutting my old Laney Pro tubes and building it into a modded fire breathing monster. Jose mod, Caswell mod, timbucktwo mod, not sure which one yet. All I know is that it sounds anemic. As it is, its a waste of the iron right now, a PTP is def in order.

Anyway, out of the new production caps, what are the difference between the Sozo, the mallory, and the Orange drop caps tonewise? I know the sozos to me sound full and fat as I have them in my Plexi. How are the orange drops? Is a cap still a cap where toneshaping is concerned? I suspect you amp builders would have some perspective on this.. Wild Bill?

Oh dear! Here we go again!:smile:

My personal opinion is the same as how I feel about different brands of tubes, KP. There's a lot of hype and BS!

This is a topic that gets constantly debated in audiophile circles. Like with tubes, you'll get a little bit of technobabble stretched to ridiculous extremes by those who really don't understand what they're talking about. You'll get pictures of oscilloscope waveforms from different caps showing slight differences in the straightness of the display line. What you don't get is any reason to believe those differences are significant or trivial! If you understand what the waveforms are showing you also understand that the differences between a ceramic capacitor and a metal film are extremely minute. You're asked to look at all those waveforms and then you're told that they are the reason the author can "sorta hear those subtle differences"!

What the heck does that mean?:eek:

That being said, you do want to avoid buying crap! You want to get into decent quality territory. The main difference between a cheap cap and a good one is something called ESR. Put simply, the materials used to make a cap always result in the cap having some amount of internal resistance. To a circuit, it's like having a resistor in series with the capacitance value. This can affect how the circuit behaves, in a way which you might be able to hear. The tone will be changed. Not in a huge way, but perhaps noticeable.

Other techs might feel differently than me but I buy those yellow tubular caps using a metallized coating on a form of plastic which cost 50 or 60 cents for a .1 mfd at 400-600 volts. I prefer to use the 630 volt rating since they're so cheap anyway why not go for the safety factor?

These caps are as good or better than anything found in the typical guitar amp, especially vintage models. IHMO.

For a better than usual application I use Sprague Orange Drops. They have good specs, a reasonable price and thetubestore.com carries them. Very convenient!

Oil and paper brands have the lowest ESR and that's usually what those expensive hifi caps are made from. I don't have audiophile ears so I can't comment on if some folks actually hear a difference or just BS each other while bragging about how much they paid for the caps. If I'm repairing an audiophile amp I don't argue. I give the customer what he wants. Sometimes he'll try to pump me to agree that there's good technical reasons behind his choice. Since I genuinely don't know of any I don't lie but simply say that there's a lot of personal choice involved. I get him distracted about using a Souza versus an Auricap and he forgets I never said anything about needing that expensive a cap in the first place!

I will say that I can't understand why someone would prefer an expensive audiophile cap in their guitar amp. Unless you're strictly a clean jazz player why on earth would you want a hifi sounding guitar amp? You want to use $50 coupling caps that are so big you can't fit them under the chassis so you can play GreenDay, DimeBag Darrell or SRV?

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!:smile:

:food-smiley-004:

[Wild Bill]

There are definitely diffierences between coupling caps. There are four terms which get used most often when grading caps: Neutrality, dynamics, speed and transparency.
Transparancy is basically how the signal passes through the cap or it's impeding qualities. Neutrality is how a cap will colour the sound after the signal passes through it. Dynamics is the range of frequencies that can pass through the cap. Speed is the rate the cap can react to the signal.
Do you need to have perfect cap performance in a guitar amp? Not likely but decent caps will make a difference in the overall tone. There's no sense buying Hovland caps at over $10 each when they're not required. Although some might argue otherwise. Orange drops are a good choice IMO and they're a decent price. The Mallories are good as well. As for the Sozo, I've never used them so I can't comment. Hope this helps...I'm sure others can chime in with more info:smile:

Not meaning to flame you, NR, but this techie doesn't understand those terms at all! Let me post what they imply to me.

"Transparancy is basically how the signal passes through the cap or it's impeding qualities."

ALL signals will pass through the cap. It's a cap! That's what they do! What are "impeding qualities"? Is this ESR, or Equivalent Series Resistance? I covered this in my post to KP.

"Neutrality is how a cap will colour the sound after the signal passes through it."

What is meant by "colour"? Will it make the signal distorted? The signal waveform either retains it's shape or it's distorted somehow. There are no other choices. You need at least 3-4% or more THD before it's detectable by the human ear. Even the cheapest ceramic cap could only contribute a tiny fraction of that amount.


"Dynamics is the range of frequencies that can pass through the cap."

Again, ALL frequencies pass through the cap! A .1 mfd cap will pass frquencies from ZERO to MILLIONS and MILLIONS of cycles per second. Far beyond the audible range into UHF television land! Millions of times the range of audible frequencies. The REACTANCE, or AC resistance of the cap will be higher at bass frequencies than treble. It's supposed to be! That's how capacitance works! So what? The difference on how well a bass signal passes through the cap compared to a treble one is theoretically measureable but totally trivial to the application.

A good lab can measure the size of mice nuts but why argue about the size of one mouse to another if you're trying to breed elephants?

"Speed is the rate the cap can react to the signal."

The only cap material I've ever heard about where this would be a factor is with electrolytic caps. The electrolyte needs time to re-form to follow a wave. This is the reason they make good caps for filtering a 120 hz power supply ripple but not so good as a coupler in a video signal amplifier or a radio oscillator.

All the materials used in audio caps have a dry material that doesn't change with the electrical charge. The charge is built up on the surface of the material and can change at a rate a zillion times faster than an audio signal.

We're all entitled to our opinion NR and I'll defend your right to the death!:smile: but I just can't buy into ANY of these terms! To me they sound like marketing terms to get you to buy a particular brand of cap. As a techie to me they sound like so much noise.

You can describe the taste of Pepsi versus Coke all you want but if I just want a rust remover it really doesn't matter!:smile:

:food-smiley-004:

[Kapo_Polenton]

Well you both like Orange drops so I'll go with that lol. Filter cap wise, I'll save some dough on the F & T's and just buy JJ 50/50 caps. Done and done. So now i just have to figure out what the hell I wanna do. Maybe I'll make it a spring project. Thanks fellas.:rockon2:

[nonreverb]

Well, I guess the terms used by many of the audiophile types I've known in the past seem to have an interest in these parameters. I was merely restating them for anyone who might be interested..I myself don't really care that much as I stated in my post. In a guitar amp they're not applicable...however as you pointed out there are definitely bad coupling caps to stay away from. As for the impedance of the cap, ESR is the catchphrase I was groping for.:smile:

Not meaning to flame you, NR, but this techie doesn't understand those terms at all! Let me post what they imply to me.

"Transparancy is basically how the signal passes through the cap or it's impeding qualities."

ALL signals will pass through the cap. It's a cap! That's what they do! What are "impeding qualities"? Is this ESR, or Equivalent Series Resistance? I covered this in my post to KP.

"Neutrality is how a cap will colour the sound after the signal passes through it."

What is meant by "colour"? Will it make the signal distorted? The signal waveform either retains it's shape or it's distorted somehow. There are no other choices. You need at least 3-4% or more THD before it's detectable by the human ear. Even the cheapest ceramic cap could only contribute a tiny fraction of that amount.


"Dynamics is the range of frequencies that can pass through the cap."

Again, ALL frequencies pass through the cap! A .1 mfd cap will pass frquencies from ZERO to MILLIONS and MILLIONS of cycles per second. Far beyond the audible range into UHF television land! Millions of times the range of audible frequencies. The REACTANCE, or AC resistance of the cap will be higher at bass frequencies than treble. It's supposed to be! That's how capacitance works! So what? The difference on how well a bass signal passes through the cap compared to a treble one is theoretically measureable but totally trivial to the application.

A good lab can measure the size of mice nuts but why argue about the size of one mouse to another if you're trying to breed elephants?

"Speed is the rate the cap can react to the signal."

The only cap material I've ever heard about where this would be a factor is with electrolytic caps. The electrolyte needs time to re-form to follow a wave. This is the reason they make good caps for filtering a 120 hz power supply ripple but not so good as a coupler in a video signal amplifier or a radio oscillator.

All the materials used in audio caps have a dry material that doesn't change with the electrical charge. The charge is built up on the surface of the material and can change at a rate a zillion times faster than an audio signal.

We're all entitled to our opinion NR and I'll defend your right to the death!:smile: but I just can't buy into ANY of these terms! To me they sound like marketing terms to get you to buy a particular brand of cap. As a techie to me they sound like so much noise.

You can describe the taste of Pepsi versus Coke all you want but if I just want a rust remover it really doesn't matter!:smile:

:food-smiley-004:

[Scottone]

Well you both like Orange drops so I'll go with that lol. Filter cap wise, I'll save some dough on the F & T's and just buy JJ 50/50 caps. Done and done. So now i just have to figure out what the hell I wanna do. Maybe I'll make it a spring project. Thanks fellas.:rockon2:

I've always used the Orange Drops and never had a problem. I built an Allen kit once that had the yellow tubular one's mentioned by Wild Bill...they worked fine as well.

[konasexone]

Oh my god! The quality of capacitors made today is far superior to anything ever produced 25 years ago. What you have to make sure of is that you use the proper type of cap for the application, not the proper friggin color. Aluminun electrolytics do certain jobs (filtering ripple for instance), polypropylene others (tone stacks, coupling) . You have caps that tolerate high DC voltages, others have better temp stability. This info can be found on the web for specific types.
I have an expensive Sencore meter to tell me if a cap is still within spec. It doesn't tell me one sounds warmer than another, that BS. If you'd like some tropical fish caps or some orange drops I have some from 30 years ago (my engineering school kit parts) that I'll gladly sell to you for as much as you'd like.
For a lot less money you can get way better components at digi-key.ca . There are a fair number of snake oil salesman in this business. Don't get me started on tubes.

[konasexone]

There are definitely diffierences between coupling caps. There are four terms which get used most often when grading caps: Neutrality, dynamics, speed and transparency.
Transparancy is basically how the signal passes through the cap or it's impeding qualities. Neutrality is how a cap will colour the sound after the signal passes through it. Dynamics is the range of frequencies that can pass through the cap. Speed is the rate the cap can react to the signal.
Do you need to have perfect cap performance in a guitar amp? Not likely but decent caps will make a difference in the overall tone. There's no sense buying Hovland caps at over $10 each when they're not required. Although some might argue otherwise. Orange drops are a good choice IMO and they're a decent price. The Mallories are good as well. As for the Sozo, I've never used them so I can't comment. Hope this helps...I'm sure others can chime in with more info:smile:


Neutrality, dynamics, speed and transparency! I've been in the electrical/electronics/automation business for over 25 years now and I'll be the first one to admit I know nothing. I own a very expensive Sencore meter for testing capacitors and am quite familiar with its operation manual. I've read a fair amount of documentation relating to capacitors, I've even prepared technical documentation pertaining to caps for a distributing outfit I worked for shortly after graduating. Those four terms are new ones to me.

[Adicted to Tubes]

All those terms relate to how a GUITAR sounds with those caps installed.
Some caps are better sounding in a guitar amp because they fail miserably with audiophiles.They are grainy and lack depth,etc.All the things guitar amps are best at reproducing.
i spend lots of time doing coupling cap swapping and listening tests and there are some caps that are hideous sounding in a guitar amp,but are fabulous in a home stereo amp.It's lo fi all the way with a guitar amp,the worst caps are often the best sounding.

www.claramps.com

[Wild Bill]

All those terms relate to how a GUITAR sounds with those caps installed.
Some caps are better sounding in a guitar amp because they fail miserably with audiophiles.They are grainy and lack depth,etc.All the things guitar amps are best at reproducing.
i spend lots of time doing coupling cap swapping and listening tests and there are some caps that are hideous sounding in a guitar amp,but are fabulous in a home stereo amp.It's lo fi all the way with a guitar amp,the worst caps are often the best sounding.

www.claramps.com

+1! This leads us to a deeper point: the audiophile world of BS keeps trying to creep into the guitar amp market!:eek:

The haydays of high fidelity were the 1950's. Good sound was being discovered and improved almost daily! There were dozens of magazines on the rack for the home user, featuring great articles on how to build your own folded horn corner speaker enclosure, how to replace the tone arm on your record player with something better, or how to build a new power amp with 6L6's and an ultralinear output transformer.

People took it for granted that they could make their own stuff! They had no problem reading countless articles and buying technical books. They had an insatiable appetite to DO it for REAL!

It wasn't just hifi. People had their own lathes in their basement, not always just for wood projects but to build metal steam engines and whatnot.

It was the Golden Era for hobbies, of all kinds. The depth many folks plumbed with their hobbies could be impressive. Model rockets that soared to thousands of feet. Hot rod cars that set new records at the dragstrip.

All this seems to be almost gone today. Whether it's for lack of time with long hours at work and time wasted commuting, or the new attitude in society that only formal education has value and that you can't possibly know how to wipe your butt if you don't have a certificate, I dunno. Still, look at those store magazine racks. There's almost no magazines left that have do-it-yourself articles, except for Home Depot. That tells us there's just no market there for the mag publishers.

Electronics perhaps took the biggest hit. When the world went solid state in the 60's with transistors and later IC's it actually would cost you more to build something yourself than to buy something built by the Japanese. For most folks it just made more sense to go with "store-bought".

So all those "build your own stereo preamp" articles disappeared from the magazines. What were they going to write about? The first step was to fill the pages with reviews of store bought equipment. Audiophiles no longer talked about the actual circuits in their amps. Instead, they talked about the MODEL NUMBERS of their amps!

Next, it became all about the money! Nobody could understand the value of your amp's neat circuitry but anyone could be impressed by how much it cost! Manufacturers were happy to oblige by jacking up their prices! When the market switched to components instead of the bigass old home hifi cabinets I remember seeing patch cables showing up in the stores. At first there was a problem. How do you market your cables to sell better than a competitor's? Your typical customer had no idea of technical specs. The answer? Give 'em a flash of gold plate! If they've got gold they must be good, right? Nobody knew or cared that tv, radio and NASA Mission Control didn't have a gold-plated connector anywhere in their installations. What did they know?

Tech articles came back to the mags, but only as technobabble. The new metal film resistors were indeed quieter than the old fashioned carbon comps. This would be good for 3-4 FULL PAGES of specs way over the average audiophile's head and TOTALLY UNCONNECTED to the quality of the sound! Sure did sound impressive when you quacked it out to your buddies, as you showed off your over-priced store-bought sound system.

Coupling caps that cost $40 each or more, $1000 power cords, oxygen-free copper speaker wire (at $400 per FOOT!), these type of items generated pages and pages of filler for audiophile magazines.

It's all technobabble crap! P T Barnum freak show stuff to part the marks from their money. Real engineers shook their heads in horror. Marketing guys looked on in envy and wondered how they could get a piece of the action.

Meanwhile, musicians had for the most part stuck with tubes! Electric guitar wasn't supposed to sound "hifi"! This meant that there was a market for keeping those old amps going and as tube technology was more DIY friendly we developed a market for building our own amps!

The audiophile world has been looking at this market in hunger for some years. They would LOVE to get musicians to buy $1000 power cords! Their technobabble is also attractive. It's a bit of work to read old electronics textbooks and learn how a capacitor actually functions in a circuit. Or how the circuit actually works at all! Much easier to memorize BS from an audiophile magazine about the "transparency" of one $40 coupling cap from another.

Does it make you a techno-guru to be able to quote the prices of the top five audiophile brands of coupling caps when you have no idea of the microfarad value of two of those caps in parallel? Or their phoney specs?

It's all just the same old medicine show game. Real learning takes effort so most folks go with hype and glitter.

Even those "amp porn" pix bother me some days. I appreciate a nice looking amp as much as anybody but often it seems the cosmetics are selling the amp instead of it's actual sound! Lots of guys build some pretty ugly looking homebuilt amps that for sheer tone blow the doors off many boutique amps but when the time comes to put them on Craigslist no one wants to give them any money for them.

(Memo to those DIY guys: Stick a Souza cap inside your home built amp! Don't bother actually wiring it up to anything. Just mount it between two unused tie points and you'll get an extra $100 for your amp!)

I'll wrap it up with a warning. If you want to see the guitar amp market change to where you can't find a Champ style amp for under $5000, just keep listening to that audiophile crap! Nobody will actually play amps anymore. They'll just brag to each other about how much they paid for them!

:food-smiley-004:

[nonreverb]

Wow! Talk about opening up a hornets nest! Well, I believe it's good that this discussion is happening and there are many other related subjects that could be added to this thread...LP's vs. CD's perhaps?...The point is that there are those out there that will swear that things like cap parameters have real value (pardon the pun :) and they are entitled to their opinion. I don't really care myself as I stated earlier BUT I'm not on this earth to devote myself to convincing my audiophile friends that they don't know what they're talking about. Better they go about their business spending their money on caps power conditioners power cables in peace. All I know is... fixin' guitar amps, Hammonds and Leslies is my calling:food-smiley-004:

+1! This leads us to a deeper point: the audiophile world of BS keeps trying to creep into the guitar amp market!:eek:

The haydays of high fidelity were the 1950's. Good sound was being discovered and improved almost daily! There were dozens of magazines on the rack for the home user, featuring great articles on how to build your own folded horn corner speaker enclosure, how to replace the tone arm on your record player with something better, or how to build a new power amp with 6L6's and an ultralinear output transformer.

People took it for granted that they could make their own stuff! They had no problem reading countless articles and buying technical books. They had an insatiable appetite to DO it for REAL!

It wasn't just hifi. People had their own lathes in their basement, not always just for wood projects but to build metal steam engines and whatnot.

It was the Golden Era for hobbies, of all kinds. The depth many folks plumbed with their hobbies could be impressive. Model rockets that soared to thousands of feet. Hot rod cars that set new records at the dragstrip.

All this seems to be almost gone today. Whether it's for lack of time with long hours at work and time wasted commuting, or the new attitude in society that only formal education has value and that you can't possibly know how to wipe your butt if you don't have a certificate, I dunno. Still, look at those store magazine racks. There's almost no magazines left that have do-it-yourself articles, except for Home Depot. That tells us there's just no market there for the mag publishers.

Electronics perhaps took the biggest hit. When the world went solid state in the 60's with transistors and later IC's it actually would cost you more to build something yourself than to buy something built by the Japanese. For most folks it just made more sense to go with "store-bought".

So all those "build your own stereo preamp" articles disappeared from the magazines. What were they going to write about? The first step was to fill the pages with reviews of store bought equipment. Audiophiles no longer talked about the actual circuits in their amps. Instead, they talked about the MODEL NUMBERS of their amps!

Next, it became all about the money! Nobody could understand the value of your amp's neat circuitry but anyone could be impressed by how much it cost! Manufacturers were happy to oblige by jacking up their prices! When the market switched to components instead of the bigass old home hifi cabinets I remember seeing patch cables showing up in the stores. At first there was a problem. How do you market your cables to sell better than a competitor's? Your typical customer had no idea of technical specs. The answer? Give 'em a flash of gold plate! If they've got gold they must be good, right? Nobody knew or cared that tv, radio and NASA Mission Control didn't have a gold-plated connector anywhere in their installations. What did they know?

Tech articles came back to the mags, but only as technobabble. The new metal film resistors were indeed quieter than the old fashioned carbon comps. This would be good for 3-4 FULL PAGES of specs way over the average audiophile's head and TOTALLY UNCONNECTED to the quality of the sound! Sure did sound impressive when you quacked it out to your buddies, as you showed off your over-priced store-bought sound system.

Coupling caps that cost $40 each or more, $1000 power cords, oxygen-free copper speaker wire (at $400 per FOOT!), these type of items generated pages and pages of filler for audiophile magazines.

It's all technobabble crap! P T Barnum freak show stuff to part the marks from their money. Real engineers shook their heads in horror. Marketing guys looked on in envy and wondered how they could get a piece of the action.

Meanwhile, musicians had for the most part stuck with tubes! Electric guitar wasn't supposed to sound "hifi"! This meant that there was a market for keeping those old amps going and as tube technology was more DIY friendly we developed a market for building our own amps!

The audiophile world has been looking at this market in hunger for some years. They would LOVE to get musicians to buy $1000 power cords! Their technobabble is also attractive. It's a bit of work to read old electronics textbooks and learn how a capacitor actually functions in a circuit. Or how the circuit actually works at all! Much easier to memorize BS from an audiophile magazine about the "transparency" of one $40 coupling cap from another.

Does it make you a techno-guru to be able to quote the prices of the top five audiophile brands of coupling caps when you have no idea of the microfarad value of two of those caps in parallel? Or their phoney specs?

It's all just the same old medicine show game. Real learning takes effort so most folks go with hype and glitter.

Even those "amp porn" pix bother me some days. I appreciate a nice looking amp as much as anybody but often it seems the cosmetics are selling the amp instead of it's actual sound! Lots of guys build some pretty ugly looking homebuilt amps that for sheer tone blow the doors off many boutique amps but when the time comes to put them on Craigslist no one wants to give them any money for them.

(Memo to those DIY guys: Stick a Souza cap inside your home built amp! Don't bother actually wiring it up to anything. Just mount it between two unused tie points and you'll get an extra $100 for your amp!)

I'll wrap it up with a warning. If you want to see the guitar amp market change to where you can't find a Champ style amp for under $5000, just keep listening to that audiophile crap! Nobody will actually play amps anymore. They'll just brag to each other about how much they paid for them!

:food-smiley-004:

[Wild Bill]

Wow! Talk about opening up a hornets nest! Well, I believe it's good that this discussion is happening and there are many other related subjects that could be added to this thread...LP's vs. CD's perhaps?...The point is that there are those out there that will swear that things like cap parameters have real value (pardon the pun :) and they are entitled to their opinion. I don't really care myself as I stated earlier BUT I'm not on this earth to devote myself to convincing my audiophile friends that they don't know what they're talking about. Better they go about their business spending their money on caps power conditioners power cables in peace. All I know is... fixin' guitar amps, Hammonds and Leslies is my calling:food-smiley-004:


Yeah, I thought I'd spark some fun, NR!:smile:

That being said, I'm not saying ALL audiophiles are full of crap! Just any that don't give real technical arguments. If someone starts talking to me about how he went up one gauge in speaker wire and noticed an improvement in tone then I write him off as someone who doesn't know impedance from reactance.

If someone tells me he BUILT a power amp and noticed differences in the tone when he switched from a long tailed pair phase inverter to a Concertina circuit THEN I'll listen to him!

When a customer buys his own tubes from some guy in Buttkick, Iowa and brings them to me to install in his amp and shows me 5 different brands of 12AX7's and a list to install a different brand in each socket position I figure that tube vendor is either crooked or more likely has never even put a new plug on a lamp!:smile:

Just driving an expensive car does not make you a genius engine mechanic! Totally different skill sets.

:food-smiley-004:

[dobsont]

Thread of the week!

[sysexguy]

....or not

[Adicted to Tubes]

I just laugh at guys who want expensive' audiophile crap in their amps.
I build so many amps and have not heard a monumental difference from cheaper caps to the cream of the crop like 'blackcats'. I built a couple of 5E3's with Auricaps and they sound about exactly the same as the ones i build with 50 cent mallory's.
There are diffrences in the quality of sound from one type to the next,but almost nothing worth noting from guitar amp caps to audiophile caps.
The biggest difference I noted was an emptier felling in my wallet.
everyone oh's and ah's at vintage amps because they sound so good compared to modern PC crap.Why?Because guys like Leo Fender used the cheapest stuff he could get his hands on back then in order to make a buck.
Does that mean you can hack together a guitar amp using bottom of the barrel parts and it will sound great?Not likely,but a careful selection of lo-fi parts and some care wiring it up can yield some terrific results.No audiophiles need apply.It almost sounds like a dirty word,doesn't it?

www.claramps.com

[µ¿ z3®ø™]

That being said, I'm not saying ALL audiophiles are full of crap! Just any that don't give real technical arguments.

despite my loathing the term 'audiophile', i think Ur terms might be too narrow. early solid state amps sounded like crap and yet measured much better than valve amps. nobody knew why until 10-15 years later when otala published his paper on transient intermodulation distortion. likewise w/ early 16/44.1 digital. sounded like crap compared to good analogue playback despite the digital measuring much better. a half dozen years go by and folks began to look at jitter as being the culprit.

it's been proven time and again that folks can hear things and have no understanding of the technical implications. often, folks hear what is going on before there is a technical understanding of why there is a difference. now, i'm not about to defend some of the spurious claims made by manufacturers, but i have done enough double blind listening tests over the past three decades to know that, under certain conditions, i can hear things that i have little technical understanding of.

one can look ay the sky and see it as blue w/o an empirical understanding of why it is blue.

that being said, i think the new generation of hermetically sealed paper in oil caps from jensen and others are spectacular in tweed amp circuits.

[Scottone]

that being said, i think the new generation of hermetically sealed paper in oil caps from jensen and others are spectacular in tweed amp circuits.

Have you been able to A/B the same amp with and without the Jensen's? By A/B, I mean in real time with 2 amps.

[µ¿ z3®ø™]

Have you been able to A/B the same amp with and without the Jensen's? By A/B, I mean in real time with 2 amps.

i wish it were as simple ass that. the short answer is yes.
and no.

the problem is that two amps that have the same components other than the signal caps will still sound and respond slightly different because of component variations apart from the caps. my assertion is based partly on side by side comparison, but mostly by listening to several amps from the same builder some w/ the jensens and some w/o.

it's interesting that the phenomena of using audiophile parts in guitar amps is being discussed. alessandro amps are widely touted as using audiophile parts and i don't particularly care for the sound of them, altho' some folks really like them. komet also uses high grade parts and i have yet to hear of anyone that has experience w/ the komets and has failed to be very impressed.

i think it still comes down to the individual amp builder and their particular acumen for tuning an amp. while it may be true that leo fender was notoriously cheap and put whatever good components in his amps that he could obtain based on economics, it's certainly not true that every amp was absolutely spectacular. i think when 'special' amps happened (neil young's deluxe, clapton's original twin, etc...) it was more of a happy accident than anything else.

w/ the advent of small, independent amp builders (ken fischer, howard dumble, gerald weber, mark sampson) it became apparent that individuals could build amps in limited quantities and achieve far more consistent results than the production 'classics' or tune by ear the basic design. since that time we have had an increasing number of individuals that have jumped into the fray and the result, as i observe it, is that there are far more really great amps that are being built than what i can ever recall.

[Scottone]

i think it still comes down to the individual amp builder and their particular acumen for tuning an amp. while it may be true that leo fender was notoriously cheap and put whatever good components in his amps that he could obtain based on economics, it's certainly not true that every amp was absolutely spectacular. i think when 'special' amps happened (neil young's deluxe, clapton's original twin, etc...) it was more of a happy accident than anything else.

w/ the advent of small, independent amp builders (ken fischer, howard dumble, gerald weber, mark sampson) it became apparent that individuals could build amps in limited quantities and achieve far more consistent results than the production 'classics' or tune by ear the basic design. since that time we have had an increasing number of individuals that have jumped into the fray and the result, as i observe it, is that there are far more really great amps that are being built than what i can ever recall.

Agree 100%. With the +- 20% tolerence on many parts, there can be a large variation between samples the parts aren't selected for a finer range of values. I just play boutique amps now for that reason....will be taking delivery of my 2nd Stephenson amp in about a week.

I was just curious about the Jensens because there are so many folks raving about them.

The only time I've ever been able to do a realtime comparison was when I upgraded my AC-15 re-issue with a Mercury Mag O/P transformer. By buddy had the same amp, so we were able to compare them head-to-head. In that case, the transformer swap made a fairly significant difference (for the better)

[fraser]

+1! This leads us to a deeper point: the audiophile world of BS keeps trying to creep into the guitar amp market!:eek:

The haydays of high fidelity were the 1950's. Good sound was being discovered and improved almost daily! There were dozens of magazines on the rack for the home user, featuring great articles on how to build your own folded horn corner speaker enclosure, how to replace the tone arm on your record player with something better, or how to build a new power amp with 6L6's and an ultralinear output transformer.

People took it for granted that they could make their own stuff! They had no problem reading countless articles and buying technical books. They had an insatiable appetite to DO it for REAL!

It wasn't just hifi. People had their own lathes in their basement, not always just for wood projects but to build metal steam engines and whatnot.

It was the Golden Era for hobbies, of all kinds. The depth many folks plumbed with their hobbies could be impressive. Model rockets that soared to thousands of feet. Hot rod cars that set new records at the dragstrip.

All this seems to be almost gone today. Whether it's for lack of time with long hours at work and time wasted commuting, or the new attitude in society that only formal education has value and that you can't possibly know how to wipe your butt if you don't have a certificate, I dunno. Still, look at those store magazine racks. There's almost no magazines left that have do-it-yourself articles, except for Home Depot. That tells us there's just no market there for the mag publishers.

Electronics perhaps took the biggest hit. When the world went solid state in the 60's with transistors and later IC's it actually would cost you more to build something yourself than to buy something built by the Japanese. For most folks it just made more sense to go with "store-bought".

So all those "build your own stereo preamp" articles disappeared from the magazines. What were they going to write about? The first step was to fill the pages with reviews of store bought equipment. Audiophiles no longer talked about the actual circuits in their amps. Instead, they talked about the MODEL NUMBERS of their amps!

Next, it became all about the money! Nobody could understand the value of your amp's neat circuitry but anyone could be impressed by how much it cost! Manufacturers were happy to oblige by jacking up their prices! When the market switched to components instead of the bigass old home hifi cabinets I remember seeing patch cables showing up in the stores. At first there was a problem. How do you market your cables to sell better than a competitor's? Your typical customer had no idea of technical specs. The answer? Give 'em a flash of gold plate! If they've got gold they must be good, right? Nobody knew or cared that tv, radio and NASA Mission Control didn't have a gold-plated connector anywhere in their installations. What did they know?

Tech articles came back to the mags, but only as technobabble. The new metal film resistors were indeed quieter than the old fashioned carbon comps. This would be good for 3-4 FULL PAGES of specs way over the average audiophile's head and TOTALLY UNCONNECTED to the quality of the sound! Sure did sound impressive when you quacked it out to your buddies, as you showed off your over-priced store-bought sound system.

Coupling caps that cost $40 each or more, $1000 power cords, oxygen-free copper speaker wire (at $400 per FOOT!), these type of items generated pages and pages of filler for audiophile magazines.

It's all technobabble crap! P T Barnum freak show stuff to part the marks from their money. Real engineers shook their heads in horror. Marketing guys looked on in envy and wondered how they could get a piece of the action.

Meanwhile, musicians had for the most part stuck with tubes! Electric guitar wasn't supposed to sound "hifi"! This meant that there was a market for keeping those old amps going and as tube technology was more DIY friendly we developed a market for building our own amps!

The audiophile world has been looking at this market in hunger for some years. They would LOVE to get musicians to buy $1000 power cords! Their technobabble is also attractive. It's a bit of work to read old electronics textbooks and learn how a capacitor actually functions in a circuit. Or how the circuit actually works at all! Much easier to memorize BS from an audiophile magazine about the "transparency" of one $40 coupling cap from another.

Does it make you a techno-guru to be able to quote the prices of the top five audiophile brands of coupling caps when you have no idea of the microfarad value of two of those caps in parallel? Or their phoney specs?

It's all just the same old medicine show game. Real learning takes effort so most folks go with hype and glitter.

Even those "amp porn" pix bother me some days. I appreciate a nice looking amp as much as anybody but often it seems the cosmetics are selling the amp instead of it's actual sound! Lots of guys build some pretty ugly looking homebuilt amps that for sheer tone blow the doors off many boutique amps but when the time comes to put them on Craigslist no one wants to give them any money for them.

(Memo to those DIY guys: Stick a Souza cap inside your home built amp! Don't bother actually wiring it up to anything. Just mount it between two unused tie points and you'll get an extra $100 for your amp!)

I'll wrap it up with a warning. If you want to see the guitar amp market change to where you can't find a Champ style amp for under $5000, just keep listening to that audiophile crap! Nobody will actually play amps anymore. They'll just brag to each other about how much they paid for them!

:food-smiley-004:


this is the post of the year
cheers bill
:food-smiley-004: