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OIL AND PAPER CAPACITOR

#63
photo 3.JPG


I would like to make an open confession here that I have indeed personally used the Emerson caps in my Cabronita clone build....
I figured, I have already spent 1200 or so on the project, what's another 20 bucks?
I will say, they do look cool.
 
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#67
Fancy caps are stupid, do nothing for your tone. Cloth wiring? Now THAT'S an upgrade that'll improve your tone! Swapped my tired plastic wiring with all cloth, what a difference! At gigs now the audience can't get enough, women won't leave me alone, and my dad actually told me he was proud of me! Ok, so he more IMPLIED that he was proud. But still...
 
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#69
there's a sucker born every minute. glad I bought Nichicon .047 caps years ago when they were 28 cents. last year I bought 10 Russian PIO caps for 33 cents each. not because of being PIO, they were cheap af and I needed them for a project. I didn't hear any difference between the PIO's and Nichicon metal films
 
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#73
Oh man. :rollno:

This comes up all the time on this board. And there's always a few guys who talk about ESR, and other electrical properties of caps, other than capacitance, and how these measurable properties vary for different types of caps. That's well and good, but with respect, and IMHO, you guys are missing the point. The question here is not whether these differences exist, but whether these differences can be heard.

The only way to assess this in a scientific way is with a double blind trial.

I'm a pro player/producer, and I think I have a pretty good ear, but I'm the first to admit I have no ear for the subtleties of passive tone controls. I just don't use them. In fact I rarely use a passive bass at all. So I'm more than I'm happy to accept that one type of cap sounds better than the others, provided this info is arrived at scientifically.

Honestly, I could sware that my car goes better after I wash her. And that milk from a plastic bottle tastes different than milk from a carton. We all have these sort of things, and musicians are no different. But there's no science in these hunches.

I have a friend who did double blind trials at uni as part of his masters to compare components of his valve RIAA (phono) preamp design. It was many years ago, but I remember being surprised what people could and couldn't actually hear.

Perhaps there's an EE undergrad on the board who could do some double blind trials on tone caps for uni credit...? With a decent sample size and some sound science (pun intended :D ), perhaps we could finally put this to bed...
 
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#74
RobbieK said:
Perhaps there's an EE undergrad on the board who could do some double blind trials on tone caps for uni credit...? With a decent sample size and some sound science (pun intended :D ), perhaps we could finally put this to bed...
Click to expand...

That would be cool. They would need to build a device to automatically pick an open string (or strings) on a guitar at a fixed bpm, so that pick attack and dynamics are consistent. I've seen videos where guitarists play far fancier licks once replacing component X (pickup, cap, whatever), and claim that the component is responsible for the difference. It might be worth comparing quickly dampened notes with longer notes, allowed to sustain for several seconds or so.

A second device would automatically ramp the tone control from 1o to 0 and back to 10 over a defined period of time. Some wunderkid could probably program the whole thing using a Raspberry Pi.

Finally, measure the capacitance of the capacitors, and test multiples of each type, rather than one Panosonic film capacitor grubbed out of a broken VCR, one swanky repro PIO cap, one cheap ceramic unit... Again the Youtube guys fall down when they only test a single capacitor of the type, and only report the reported value rather than the capacitance of each specific cap.
 
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#76
ddnidd1 said:
If you're interested in a Significant boost in audio quality, want something that's also attractive to the eye and isn't ridiculously priced, I always recommend these as the best bang for the buck.

Advanced Audio Video Tweak
Click to expand...
How have I never heard of these? Just spent $1000 on these to upgrade my tone. Can't wait to use them on a gig next weekend!
 
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#79
Axstar said:
That would be cool. They would need to build a device to automatically pick an open string (or strings) on a guitar at a fixed bpm, so that pick attack and dynamics are consistent. I've seen videos where guitarists play far fancier licks once replacing component X (pickup, cap, whatever), and claim that the component is responsible for the difference. It might be worth comparing quickly dampened notes with longer notes, allowed to sustain for several seconds or so.

A second device would automatically ramp the tone control from 1o to 0 and back to 10 over a defined period of time. Some wunderkid could probably program the whole thing using a Raspberry Pi.

Finally, measure the capacitance of the capacitors, and test multiples of each type, rather than one Panosonic film capacitor grubbed out of a broken VCR, one swanky repro PIO cap, one cheap ceramic unit... Again the Youtube guys fall down when they only test a single capacitor of the type, and only report the reported value rather than the capacitance of each specific cap.
Click to expand...
The point of the double blind test is that neither the subject or the tester know.
 
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