The 'Sound' of Capacitors..

[GuitarlCarl]

Do different capacitors types really sound different at the frequencies seen in guitar pedals, amps, speakers ?

What do you think ?

If you do think there's a difference, what type do you prefer ?

Some interesting and questionable claims in this article:

http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/I ... rt_II.aspx

I especially like this: " If you want to use the vintage caps, make sure that you use vintage cloth wire inside your guitar and the Gibson fifties vintage wiring, otherwise you will not fully experience the tones from these caps."
So you don't get the proper effect from the cap unless you connect it with old wire ?


When people start making claims like this "tends to pronounce the mid frequencies a bit", I really have to question it.
Frequency response is easily checked and I bet no cap will show a difference.

I had to go back just to see what started this thread...
For the most part I think the article is just filler. They are talking about wiring in a guitar though, and to my ears, fifties style wiring does sound better IF you use your tone control. I may not be an electrical engineer, but I don't have to be to wire guitars and THAT is something I do know about. Cloth wire? Only if your trying to keep the vintage look. PIO? Yes please I think they sound warmer, but I play classic blues rock. If you play metal, use something crisp like a sprague orange drop. If nothing else, spending a couple bucks on quality only increases the reliability of your axe. Really if you want to get deeper than that, who are you trying to convince? They're your ears not mine...

[diagrammatiks]

The problem is that there aren't many builders or people equipped to do any sort of real comparisons in controlled situations.

The datasheets put out by companies do definitely show functional differences...

tons of white papers were published when polycarbonate went obsolete like the one wima published here...

http://www.wima.de/EN/polycarbonate.htm

A few more were published once polystyrene went obsolete although it came back later.

But, most often what people say about caps is worthless...
I was on another forum and somebody swore up and down that the sozo's he put in his amp were much better then wimas...

and then the picture he posted of the before and after had the wima's all neatly laid down on the pcb but the sozos were strung up vertically with an extra inch of lead on one side.

No doubt he heard a difference, but not one that matters.

[artifus]

how about the 'sound' of the players fingers?

how about the 'sound' perceived by your brain via your ears in the environment and mood you happen to be perceiving it in at this very moment in time through what ever equipment is being used to produce, alter and observe the phenomena?

how about 'sound'?

how about that?

[FiveseveN]

I for one don't understand your point. Yes, how about that?
Are you trying to remind us that we are slaves to our own perception, that there is nothing outside the subjective? 'Cause that's just fine, but just say so.
I'm sorry, I've been watching a debate with Deepak Chopra and I'm particularly sensitive to fuzzy language today.

[artifus]

i guess my point was that until what is considered a good sound is decided upon in consensus that there is little point in arguing about the inherent merits or lack of in the individual components used to approach recreating this great sound you all speak of. if finding and describing this sound requires pointing at graphs on datasheets instead of simple component swapping and listening then something is not right imho.

'sorry jimi, gonna have to get another take of that'

'wha? that was great man, what are you talking about?'

'yeah, but that fuzzface has electros in it. use this one - it's got tants'

the components are just a part of a system in which your ears and brain play the biggest part.

i quite like fuzzy logic. gives one space in which to manoeuvre. not great for communication though.

[telecaster]

how about the 'sound' of the players fingers?

how about the 'sound' perceived by your brain via your ears in the environment and mood you happen to be perceiving it in at this very moment in time through what ever equipment is being used to produce, alter and observe the phenomena?

how about 'sound'?

how about that?

If you listen to the cork sniffers on the last couple of pages, you're not qualified to made a decision on sound because you're not an electrical engineer with a scope.
Don't forget to call the fda to tell you if your dinner tasted good because you're not qualified for that either.

Best advise I can give you is to stay out of this thread.
Use what you have, buy what's cheap and build pedals or whatever, that sounds good to you.

[Seiche]

so the engineers are the cork sniffers? how about that?

[FiveseveN]

@artifus: Oh, I see now. More on this later.
@telecaster: You have missed my point completely.

In my foray into the minds and culture of modern musicians I have identified the source of our woes, of the confusion and woo-woo that leads to bickering such as we find in this unreasonably long thread (considering its purpose). Some of you may know it, it's no secret, and I claim no great discovery: it is the failure to distinguish aesthetic objectives from the tools we use to reach them.
E.g. The concept of "warm" tone (a particular set of signs) may translate to using a low-pass filter. The filter itself is not "warm" (unless perhaps from Joule heating), nor should we assume that "warm" is a desirable property of tone. It might be so, as when one seeks to obtain a "warmer" sound, and he/she might use a low-pass filter to do so.

However, the main distinction is not which properties belong to which object. It is that some of these properties are subjective (the aesthetic ones) and some are not* (the ones we use for engineering purposes: capacitance, resistance, inductance etc.).
And yes, by virtue of these real properties one can set objective goals, which have absolutely nothing to do with aesthetic values. "This amplifier must have a frequency response of 500 to 5000 Hz" could be such a goal. Notice how it claims absolutely nothing about whether it would "sound" in such-and-such way, if it will be "pleasing", "better", "warm" or some other aesthetic category.

In the same sense, a capacitor's particular parasitic properties dictate that it will function objectively better or worse in some application, as long as this application is also defined in objective parameters. Defining it in such a way is the tricky part and a lot of people simply try to substitute it with their (and/or their friends' or clients') aesthetic values. That is a category error: it's not the application or its constituents that have aesthetic properties but our subjective experience of it.

Could you** please get that through your thick, murky, mojo-clogged skulls!?

__________________________
* : insofar as scientific realism is concerned.
**: I am referring to whomever is concerned, not anyone in particular, least of all members of this forum.

[diagrammatiks]

so the engineers are the cork sniffers? how about that?

apparently.

@artifus: Oh, I see now. More on this later.
@telecaster: You have missed my point completely.

In my foray into the minds and culture of modern musicians I have identified the source of our woes, of the confusion and woo-woo that leads to bickering such as we find in this unreasonably long thread (considering its purpose). Some of you may know it, it's no secret, and I claim no great discovery: it is the failure to distinguish aesthetic objectives from the tools we use to reach them.
E.g. The concept of "warm" tone (a particular set of signs) may translate to using a low-pass filter. The filter itself is not "warm" (unless perhaps from Joule heating), nor should we assume that "warm" is a desirable property of tone. It might be so, as when one seeks to obtain a "warmer" sound, and he/she might use a low-pass filter to do so.

However, the main distinction is not which properties belong to which object. It is that some of these properties are subjective (the aesthetic ones) and some are not* (the ones we use for engineering purposes: capacitance, resistance, inductance etc.).
And yes, by virtue of these real properties one can set objective goals, which have absolutely nothing to do with aesthetic values. "This amplifier must have a frequency response of 500 to 5000 Hz" could be such a goal. Notice how it claims absolutely nothing about whether it would "sound" in such-and-such way, if it will be "pleasing", "better", "warm" or some other aesthetic category.

In the same sense, a capacitor's particular parasitic properties dictate that it will function objectively better or worse in some application, as long as this application is also defined in objective parameters. Defining it in such a way is the tricky part and a lot of people simply try to substitute it with their (and/or their friends' or clients') aesthetic values. That is a category error: it's not the application or its constituents that have aesthetic properties but our subjective experience of it.

Could you** please get that through your thick, murky, mojo-clogged skulls!?

__________________________
* : insofar as scientific realism is concerned.
**: I am referring to whomever is concerned, not anyone in particular, least of all members of this forum.

Look this is so simple and obvious that I don't even understand how you someone can be alive and not understand what you wrote.

you'd have to be a fucking idiot by choice to argue against it.

[DrNomis]

+1 to fiveseven and diagrammatiks... but why do some folks keep using water to make a statement? Current is flowing but its not water, its created by a string vibrating in a magnetic field. Maybe the electrons aren't going thru the caps and I don't care about the math either. I learned ohm's law in jr high, but it doesn't matter to me, I'm just a lowly human, not an EE. But let me simplify it even more. For the sake of this thread; The Sound of Capacitors... It depends on where in the circuit they are, IF the type will affect the sound. Some caps are used as filters and some only shunt to ground, you tell me which ones make an difference...

The flow of water through a pipe is analogous to the flow of an electric current through a conductor, hence the reason why some people keep using water to make a statement, it's actually a pretty good analogy because the inter-relationship of Voltage,Current, and Resistance can be very easily transferred to it, Voltage can be represented by the water pressure which makes the water flow along the pipe, Current is represented by the amount of water flowing past a given point along the pipe, and Resistance is represented by the diameter of the pipe, the smaller the diameter, the lower the amount of water flowing past a point along the piping....

[diagrammatiks]

+1 to fiveseven and diagrammatiks... but why do some folks keep using water to make a statement? Current is flowing but its not water, its created by a string vibrating in a magnetic field. Maybe the electrons aren't going thru the caps and I don't care about the math either. I learned ohm's law in jr high, but it doesn't matter to me, I'm just a lowly human, not an EE. But let me simplify it even more. For the sake of this thread; The Sound of Capacitors... It depends on where in the circuit they are, IF the type will affect the sound. Some caps are used as filters and some only shunt to ground, you tell me which ones make an difference...

The flow of water through a pipe is analogous to the flow of an electric current through a conductor, hence the reason why some people keep using water to make a statement, it's actually a pretty good analogy because the inter-relationship of Voltage,Current, and Resistance can be very easily transferred to it, Voltage can be represented by the water pressure which makes the water flow along the pipe, Current is represented by the amount of water flowing past a given point along the pipe, and Resistance is represented by the diameter of the pipe, the smaller the diameter, the lower the amount of water flowing past a point along the piping....

ya but it only models the current flow relationship and not component interaction...

water also doesn't have frequency, reactance or impedance.

[juanro]

The water flow analogy stops at the first capacitor (*)



(*) Yes, pun intended.

[kleuck]

Great posts here

[DrNomis]

+1 to fiveseven and diagrammatiks... but why do some folks keep using water to make a statement? Current is flowing but its not water, its created by a string vibrating in a magnetic field. Maybe the electrons aren't going thru the caps and I don't care about the math either. I learned ohm's law in jr high, but it doesn't matter to me, I'm just a lowly human, not an EE. But let me simplify it even more. For the sake of this thread; The Sound of Capacitors... It depends on where in the circuit they are, IF the type will affect the sound. Some caps are used as filters and some only shunt to ground, you tell me which ones make an difference...

The flow of water through a pipe is analogous to the flow of an electric current through a conductor, hence the reason why some people keep using water to make a statement, it's actually a pretty good analogy because the inter-relationship of Voltage,Current, and Resistance can be very easily transferred to it, Voltage can be represented by the water pressure which makes the water flow along the pipe, Current is represented by the amount of water flowing past a given point along the pipe, and Resistance is represented by the diameter of the pipe, the smaller the diameter, the lower the amount of water flowing past a point along the piping....

ya but it only models the current flow relationship and not component interaction...

water also doesn't have frequency, reactance or impedance.

That's true, I was looking at it from the point of view of Direct Current flow, Alternating Current flow behaves differently to Direct Current flow, with DC flow Capacitors block it altogether, due to the very high insulation resistance of the insulating material that's placed in between the two plates of the Capacitor, in the case of a typical ceramic capacitor the DC resistance of the insulating material can be well over a Gigaohm, now with AC flow the capacitor tends to act more like a frequency-dependant resistor, this AC-Resistance decreases as the frequency increases, AC-Resistance is also known as Impedance,although the terms can be used interchangeably because they mean the same thing, Inductors, or Coils/Chokes, behave oppositely to Capacitors, that is, their AC-Resistance (impedance) Increases as the frequency increases.....

If you construct a series circuit with a Capacitor, and an Inductor, and feed a sinewave through them, you'll find that at one particular frequency, the AC-Resistances, or Impedances of the Capacitor and the Inductor will be equal, but, as stated above, Capacitors and Inductors behave oppositely to each other, so we simply can't add the impedances together because they oppose each other, so, being equal, they cancel each other out and we are left with the DC resistance of the wire joining the Capacitor and Inductor together.....

[diagrammatiks]

+1 to fiveseven and diagrammatiks... but why do some folks keep using water to make a statement? Current is flowing but its not water, its created by a string vibrating in a magnetic field. Maybe the electrons aren't going thru the caps and I don't care about the math either. I learned ohm's law in jr high, but it doesn't matter to me, I'm just a lowly human, not an EE. But let me simplify it even more. For the sake of this thread; The Sound of Capacitors... It depends on where in the circuit they are, IF the type will affect the sound. Some caps are used as filters and some only shunt to ground, you tell me which ones make an difference...

The flow of water through a pipe is analogous to the flow of an electric current through a conductor, hence the reason why some people keep using water to make a statement, it's actually a pretty good analogy because the inter-relationship of Voltage,Current, and Resistance can be very easily transferred to it, Voltage can be represented by the water pressure which makes the water flow along the pipe, Current is represented by the amount of water flowing past a given point along the pipe, and Resistance is represented by the diameter of the pipe, the smaller the diameter, the lower the amount of water flowing past a point along the piping....

ya but it only models the current flow relationship and not component interaction...

water also doesn't have frequency, reactance or impedance.

That's true, I was looking at it from the point of view of Direct Current flow, Alternating Current flow behaves differently to Direct Current flow, with DC flow Capacitors block it altogether, due to the very high insulation resistance of the insulating material that's placed in between the two plates of the Capacitor, in the case of a typical ceramic capacitor the DC resistance of the insulating material can be well over a Gigaohm, now with AC flow the capacitor tends to act more like a frequency-dependant resistor, this AC-Resistance decreases as the frequency increases, AC-Resistance is also known as Impedance,although the terms can be used interchangeably because they mean the same thing, Inductors, or Coils/Chokes, behave oppositely to Capacitors, that is, their AC-Resistance (impedance) Increases as the frequency increases.....

If you construct a series circuit with a Capacitor, and an Inductor, and feed a sinewave through them, you'll find that at one particular frequency, the AC-Resistances, or Impedances of the Capacitor and the Inductor will be equal, but, as stated above, Capacitors and Inductors behave oppositely to each other, so we simply can't add the impedances together because they oppose each other, so, being equal, they cancel each other out and we are left with the DC resistance of the wire joining the Capacitor and Inductor together.....

right-o which is why I think there's some confusion about capacitor "sound" or probably more accurately performance...
It's not a DC circuit under consideration.

[kleuck]

For what it's worth (bear in mind i'm not talking pedals, but amps) i had recently some experiences with caps in amps.
I had to mod a VHT Special 6 Ultra to a "tweedesque sound" as far as it is possible for cheap.
Long story made short : i used Mallory 150 caps, as they seem to be reasonably "period correct" caps (and a PIO in the Tonestack).
But i had to use a big cap (because of my mods and the loop of the SP6U, this cap does not exist in the 5F2 which was my inspiration), only a 715P on hand, used this one (100nf).
Then i found a 47nf Mallory, so i replaced this cap.
Obvious difference at first "boot" : the tone is less bright, sounds a little less "precise" (but good for a 5F2)
Heard it, and my son -did not tell him- heard it too
After that, i thought that i had to experiment with my own SP6 (the simple version) already modded, only Mallory150 caps.
I found -by comparison with my tweeds mods, among others- that it was a little too middy and slightly blurry, so i tried an OD715 as the grid cap of the 6V6 (10nf in my case) and indeed, instantly a brighter and more "precise" amp.
My son had the same description more or less -he knew this time i had modified something obviously-
So, my experience is : even a single cap (in a simple amp at least) can lead to audible differences, and i think that, just like tubes, mixing caps is probably very often the best you can do.
I will try tomorrow a OD in the fixed-tonestack, but not sure to like it (i don't want a "modern sounding amp")

[kleuck]

As mictester asked me if i measured my caps : yes, the Polyester is 101nf and the Polypropylene is 102,4nf, less than 1,5%.
I modified my own VHT after that -a mix of OD and Mallory instead of Mallory everywhere- and had the same kind of results, with caps within 2,5%.

[earthtonesaudio]

Oh hai, this thread is still going!

Condensors sound more British than Capacitors. Go.

[DrNomis]

"Condenser " is basically the old name they used for a capacitor back in the early days of Electronics circa 1920's or so....

[kleuck]

In French, it's still "Condensateurs"