CTS Pots - Hugely disappointing or?..

Kuras

I recently 'upgraded' the pots in my 67 Jazzmaster. Unfortunately it came with cheap Jap pots so I thought I'd upgrade them to some Fender Pure Vintage JM 1m. What a load of rubbish! The taper is worst than before, the volume and tone do nothing until 2 or 3 then cut off dead fast. There is no range of subtlety to the sweep. What a rip off.

But is this a Jazzmaster thing? Do all JMs have this kind of sweep from their vol and tone?

Cheers

mrkb

Did you choose the right taper for the pots that suited your needs? Sound like you have put in linear taper, which I’m thinking might work better for my use case.

Kuras

@mrkb Yes

Funkfingers

1Meg Linear taper is historically correct for Jazzmaster and Jaguar. I am not a fan of these but any other resistance taper ruins the sound.

Danielsguitars

Just use linear volumes log volumes are bloody rubbish simple as that, I'd have told you that had you asked.

earwighoney

I'm going to have to go against the grain here, but I fucking despise CTS pots. 

Alpha pots all the way (the full size ones). 

RobG3294

They're both made in the far east - in the CTS case, it's Taiwan. The big factor one should be aware of with pots is of course the taper and especially with 1MOhm pots, any form of custom logarithmic/audio taper is going to get very juicy, very quickly and vice versa, even worse when considering typical pot tolerances.

CTS pots however are not ubiquitous - the stuff made for Fender is really the budget spec, even the pots used on the OV series stuff. A series which in every other instance are top quality bits. The stuff related to custom orders i.e. Emerson/Mojotone/RS Superpots is again, marketing hyperbole electrically speaking to a great degree but does give you a slightly more robust pot than the bottom rung CTS one. 

People have this stupid idea (perpetuated by YouTubers etc that don't really know a thing about electronics) that CTS pot upgrades are some magical USA made goodness that replaces for instance an Alpha pot. Alpha pots are used on very expensive amps for instance. Gibson used CGE (Mexican made) pots for years until they swapped to CTS at some point in the late 2000s when CGE shut down. The reason high end builders shoot for CTS now is that there really is not much else kicking around - for Guitars anyway. 

As some have said, your best bet for volume is a linear taper, however I've found the DiMarzio custom taper CTS pots to be quite nice.

Roland

It’s not the taper ratio which irritates me, but the fact that modern pots don’t taper: they change in steps.

ICBM

You need log for tone, and linear or log for volume depending on preference - I find linear better with 1M, or the drop-off (and treble loss) is too steep at the top.

Unfortunately CTS have followed the well-worn J. A. Richards path ("there is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper") beloved of modern corporate industry, rather than maintaining quality at the expense of putting prices up, which some other manufacturers - Switchcraft in particular - seem to have done.

Dodge

earwighoney said:

Alpha pots all the way (the full size ones). 

Agreed.  Plenty of CTS failures over the years, but the Alpha full size have been perfect.

Keefy

My experience of current production CTS log pots is that they suddenly ‘switch on’ as you turn them up, very much as described by the OP.

Alexlotl

I had a tech put 1 meg CTS Audio pots into a Tele Deluxe recently, volume and tone, to go with a set of CuNiFe WRHBs. 

The audio taper works great on the tone knobs, but the volume has a usable range of about 1/5th of the dial. I wish I’d gone Linear for volume.

From stuff I read on TGP, Fender used to use different ratio audio tapers back in the day, e.g 10% for tone and 30% for volume (or vice versa?), which might have been a better fit. 

ICBM

Alexlotl said:

The audio taper works great on the tone knobs, but the volume has a usable range of about 1/5th of the dial. I wish I’d gone Linear for volume.

You can actually fix it to a large extent fairly easily without replacing the pots, if you add a resistor (try 220K first) between the input and output terminals.

impmann

TBH, I swapped out the pots in my Jazzmaster to 500K Log (CTS) and now its perfect.

Did I loose the 'Jazzmaster sound'? Nope. But now I have a volume control and a tone control that aren't switches.

OilCityPickups

I now no longer recommend CTS pots - Alpha or Bourns are what I fit these days. 

RaymondLin

I put 2 x 500k CTS Audio taper in my PRS SE One a few years ago and I like them, have they gone down hill recently?

bertie

ICBM said:

You need log for tone, and linear or log for volume depending on preference - I find linear better with 1M, or the drop-off (and treble loss) is too steep at the top.

Unfortunately CTS have followed the well-worn J. A. Richards path ("there is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper") beloved of modern corporate industry, rather than maintaining quality at the expense of putting prices up, which some other manufacturers - Switchcraft in particular - seem to have done.

I remember you mentioned a little while back about two different types of pot (cheap and not so cheap), one with a circlip and one without, the latter prone to "collapsing" if the shaft is given any "duress" when attaching knobs ??   

Is this also true of other brands like Alpha

ICBM

bertie said:

I remember you mentioned a little while back about two different types of pot (cheap and not so cheap), one with a circlip and one without, the latter prone to "collapsing" if the shaft is given any "duress" when attaching knobs ??   

Is this also true of other brands like Alpha

Not as far as I've seen so far.

OilCityPickups

RaymondLin said:

I put 2 x 500k CTS Audio taper in my PRS SE One a few years ago and I like them, have they gone down hill recently?

They are not what they were ... or at least not as consistently good as they were, and some examples are downright shonky.

Loobs

Funkfingers said:

1Meg Linear taper is historically correct for Jazzmaster and Jaguar. I am not a fan of these but any other resistance taper ruins the sound.

True but 500k really tapes the ice pick. 

Loobs

I, too bought some "TAD" CTS 500k audio taper for a guitar and they were finished after a 20-show tour. Not great. True, the guitar got sweaty at every show but I expected more.