Capacitors: a case study

RVA said:
This is like a print version of the Mythbusters

The Truth about Tone Capacitors | Atlantic Quality Design, Inc. Musical Products
Click to expand...

Very interesting indeed...Here is their conclusion from the article:

"There are a thousand YouTube videos that show well meaning guitarists soldering various tone capacitors into their guitars and raving about the tone.They rave about the improved tone related to factors like the type of dielectric in a capacitor, where this is clearly not true. What’s up?

Here’s what could be happening:

  • The guitarists are simply falling prey to a musical community hypefest.
  • The guitarists want to believe that a certain capacitor has a better sound, so they believe it.
  • The capacitors they are testing have different values due to wide component tolerances. Every capacitor has a tolerance as manufactured, typically +/-10% or +/-5%. Older capacitors can drift greatly with time. We tested one capacitor (not in the table) whose value drifted continuously during measurement. It had a different sound, because it was DEFECTIVE. When you see a video or read an article regarding tone capacitors, if the capacitors being compared are not being verified and measured using a capacitance meter, then the entire exercise is a waste of time. Each capacitor, especially the old ones, must be verified to be within tolerance or tone comparisons are useless.
  • There is resistive leakage occurring within the capacitors. This has the effect of sounding like a resistor has been added in parallel with the capacitor. Pickup responses are sensitive to such resistances, and older capacitors can skew response measurements and sounds if they are leaky.We found that only one capacitor of the old ones we tested was leaky. We discarded it as defective.This leads us to the NOS (new old stock) phenomenon. The operative word in this phrase is OLD. Would you buy new old stock food? No? Why? BECAUSE IT IS OLD. If you buy NOS capacitors that have been sitting in a box since 1950, don’t expect them to be in tolerance or have low leakage. The designers of the capacitors did not expect them to be used 60 years after the manufacturing date!If you want to get the sound of a 60 year old capacitor that should have been trashed 50 years ago, just buy a $0.50 modern capacitor and place a one-cent one-megohm resistor in parallel with it. There you go. I just saved you $39.49.
To answer critics who would say, “But you tested the capacitors with no tone pot in the circuit, man. When I turn the tone pot down to 5, man, that’s where I hear the difference. Man.” If there’s no difference between capacitors A and B with no tone pot, there will be no difference with the tone pot connected, at any setting. Man.

What about the super expensive silver plated capacitors? Are they better? One would think that if such parts were great in audio amplifiers, the would also be great in cell phones, radar systems and stealth bombers. But they are not used anywhere but in the boutique audiophile and guitar markets. That is, electrical engineers are not susceptible to marketing hype and forum phlegm! We have a related article on gold plated connectors and oxygen free copper that you should read, What About Gold Connectors and Oxygen Free Copper?

Our conclusion is that two tone capacitors with the same measured capacitance value and low leakage yield the same tone, regardless of rated voltage, size, dielectric, or price!

Hypefest busted! Have a nice day."
 
I have long been a fan of the Soviet PIO K40Y tone capacitors. I keep a few always on hand and they are very cheap, have long leads and give good service. I suppose that all the differences I heard were from the variations in capacitance???
 
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Here’s an interesting post I ran into a few years back on Strat Talk.

What had happened is that a Strat owner who had a PIO cap in his Strat took it to a guitar tech to have some work done. The guitar tech stole his PIO cap and replaced it with an Orange Drop without the owner’s knowledge. The funny thing is, when he got his guitar back from the tech, he never noticed any difference in tone between the PIO he had in it and the Orange Drop that had been surreptitiously installed. It wasn’t until he opened up the guitar years later and saw the Orange Drop that he realized what had happened.

Capacitor: Orange drop vs Paper in oil
 
Goldmember's humble opinion: Capacitors are like candy at Walgreen's.
So many exciting colors and shapes, plus a variety of new and vintage favorites.
Whether it makes a difference or not, it's just fun and shexshy to fondle a bumblebee,
then to caress an orange drop. I installed a Fender PIO in my 50s Strat, simply for the
sake of nostalgia.
 
Goldmember said:
Goldmember's humble opinion: Capacitors are like candy at Walgreen's.
So many exciting colors and shapes, plus a variety of new and vintage favorites.
Whether it makes a difference or not, it's just fun and shexshy to fondle a bumblebee,
then to caress an orange drop. I installed a Fender PIO in my 50s Strat, simply for the
sake of nostalgia.
Click to expand...

I got a big box of them really cheap in my two favorite flavors....
 
Oil caps are my favorite, then polypropylene (orange drops and a couple others) for tone/signal paths. I like metal films like Mallory for their quietness (especially in like a tremolo section). I also like the Tropical Fish caps in general if and when I have them on hand. To me all red crayons may be red, but all red crayons don't color the same. Of course this topic is like the topic of how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll tootsie pop - a one, a two, a thrrreeeee - the world may never know ;)
 
A couple years ago I noticed that PRS uses the very inexpensive Mallory 150's as tone caps on some of their guitars. Well, if it's good enough for PRS...
 
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I will stick with K40Y's...and 2 conductor, vintage-wired pickups...and copper shielding too. I can send my cell phone on top the pickups on the S-G, with it plugged in and amp turned up, and call my cell and there is zero noise.

If I do this with my unshielded 2016 Gibson Les Paul it crackles, pops and makes strange oscillating tones...like an AM radio tuning between stations...

Tell me this copper doesn't work...in the studio, my guitar is the ONLY one that doesn't start 'chirping' before someone receives a text message.

SG 2 Conductors with Shileding.jpg
 
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Y'know, this is all a hobby for most of us (I assume some on here are working musicians) so it should be interesting and fun. There are no "right" answers for most things, just do what makes you happy and enjoy the hobby. If you like putting PIO or bumblebees in a guitar for no other reason than they look cool, that's reason enough.
 
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