Capacitor swap?

JonHosker · September 2016

Anyone had any experience of swapping their Strat ceramic capacitor for a BKP Jensen oil and paper type? £14.50 is steep, but I reckon it may be worth it.
Certainly it's a mod I can do myself! (I will check the spec, but probably 0.022 Mfd)
thanks
Jon

Adam_MD · September 2016

It'll look cool but that's about it. I usually just fit orange drops and sometimes use paper in oil but mostly just for the mojo factor I don't think you'll really notice a difference if they're all the same value.

Cirrus · September 2016

Yeah, value is the only thing that matters in guitars - how pretty it looks is incidental, unless you get a kick from having spent more than you needed to on something that looks cosmetically a bit fancier than a ceramic disk.

There's just not enough voltage in a guitar to awaken the different characteristics of capacitor types - you can hear the difference in guitar amps because there's hundreds of volts across them.

FelineGuitars · September 2016

Cirrus said:

Yeah, value is the only thing that matters in guitars - how pretty it looks is incidental, unless you get a kick from having spent more than you needed to on something that looks cosmetically a bit fancier than a ceramic disk.

There's just not enough voltage in a guitar to awaken the different characteristics of capacitor types - you can hear the difference in guitar amps because there's hundreds of volts across them.

Wisdom for that!

one of the problems with so many of the ceramic discs is that they are so far off spec in terms of value
Putting a closer spec one in will yield results- and the orange drops fit in easily .

I do like the Jensens and still fit them to my guitars as you kind of expect high parts in a high end guitar but the orange drop will do you fine and you'd never hear any difference

FWIW we made a switching box so you can blindly compare different caps (of exactly same value) against each other without knowing which one you were hearing till later , and at guitar voltage levels we couldn't tell between the types , even though we kind of wanted to be able to.

Roland · September 2016

The only difference that you can hear in a guitar is when the capacitance value is different. Not just the headline value. Ceramic capacitor's are rated at + 20%. Some other types have smaller tolerances, and are closer to the headline value. Also capacitance can wander with temperature, humidity, and age.

Personally I use polymer rather than ceramic because the tolerance is tighter, and they are less susceptible to temperature and humidity. I avoid 50s style capacitor's, such as Sprague and paper-in-oil, because of their size.

ICBM · September 2016

JonHosker said:

Anyone had any experience of swapping their Strat ceramic capacitor for a BKP Jensen oil and paper type? £14.50 is steep, but I reckon it may be worth it.

No, it isn't - unless the 'mojo' from knowing there's a fancy cap in the guitar matters to you. As already said it will make no difference to the tone whatever.

I also slightly disagree with Roland that the precise value matters - the reason caps have tolerances as high as 20% is that it doesn't really. You can probably hear a difference with caps at the extreme outer ends of the tolerance range, but that's about it - I did some direct-switching testing on this, and the smallest change that was definitely audible was about -25% or +33% from the marked value… and even then that was very subtle and not detectable unless you were actually listening for the change.

For what it's worth the now very valuable 1960s Strats used ceramic caps as stock, so it you want true vintage mojo you want ceramic

.

JonHosker · September 2016

Thanks - fools gold maybe - just a kid in a sweet shop again....!! Will stick with my stock ceramic then. Thanks for the wisdom.

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Capacitor swap?

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