Jensen Audio caps, worth the money?

[kleuck]

The facts are : i don't hear a different amp each day, nor does my son, and my friends do not have the feeling of playing a different BJ or Blues Deluxe every morning...but they do when i change Polypros for PIOs etc.
So that is non-sense, you are saying that i should, and i do not.
BTW in France, we have the chance to have a steady line voltage.
And i do not have the faith, i did not think caps could sound different in the past, and tried a lot without hearing anything, but i had crappy amps and axes at the time.
Then with better gear, one day i tried a PIO in my axe, and the difference with any other cap was huge.
You know why ceramics are regarded as crappy (though, i love them sometimes) and same for the electrolytics, ONLY because their issues are documented, fine, I hear some undocumented differences with other caps, and i won't wait to find the technical documentation (i would probably not understand it anyway) to use them.

[soundguruman]

I have done what 99.9% of you would never do.
Well, I have sat over amps for months..with guitars and speakers.
Changing parts over and over, through hundreds of parts, all different flavors...
Playing, and measuring over and over and over, through hundreds of tests.

Which parts have more / less noise, hum, distortion, oscillation...
which parts sound more / less hi fi? Which parts are more / less microphonic...
Which parts produce the tone / gain / sustain, that I like the best. While actually blasting the amp at full volume for each change...and actually playing through it to listen to the difference.
And actually measuring, with scopes, etc...different resistors, different wire, different grounding schemes, different tubes...

And my conclusion is, every part has it's own characteristic sound quality.
If you have six caps: .68uF you have six different results.
A cap, is a cap, is a cap? Sorry not true.

That's how I formed my own conclusions about sound quality.
You might say "this" is always true...or "that" is always true, but in sound quality, it don't work out that way.
For 90% of the sound characteristics, there probably IS no measurement, which accurately describes the result.

[J M Fahey]

Why should they forgot and find an immediate difference without knowing i made changes ?

because they are human, and their measuring instrument is human ears.
That alone accounts for any "sound difference" perceived.

Besides, unless you do something drastic like replace your speaker with a 3 way cabinet with a bullet tweeter or with a "1000W Car woofer", people won't comment on their own how different your amp sounds today.
So if they do, I bet it's because you ask them "do you hear anything different today"?
And knowing you . , the "correct" answer is: "yes, it sounds different today".
Biased testimony if I ever saw one.

Some months ago I asked you specifically to stop bullying your son into "agreeing with Dad".
It's hard for an adult to argue with a fanatic such as you, even more for a child and much worse if it's your own Son, so please stop using him as a "witness".

Go for double blind tests and you will be more credible.

[soundguruman]

More accurately, we could place sensors on the human brain.
Music releases certain reactions in the brain chemicals. This is proposed to be the reason we "like" music.
It has also been proposed that these releases of brain chemicals are similar to the brain chemical releases experienced during sex. (just say'in)

If we could place sensors, and measure the changes in brain chemical reactions, while actually listening to rock and roll,
we may finally be able to measure what sounds: "good."

[kleuck]

because they are human, and their measuring instrument is human ears.
That alone accounts for any "sound difference" perceived.

Besides, unless you do something drastic like replace your speaker with a 3 way cabinet with a bullet tweeter or with a "1000W Car woofer", people won't comment on their own how different your amp sounds today.
So if they do, I bet it's because you ask them "do you hear anything different today"?
And knowing you . , the "correct" answer is: "yes, it sounds different today".
Biased testimony if I ever saw one.

Some months ago I asked you specifically to stop bullying your son into "agreeing with Dad".
It's hard for an adult to argue with a fanatic such as you, even more for a child and much worse if it's your own Son, so please stop using him as a "witness".

Go for double blind tests and you will be more credible.

I don't specially want to be credible, i just report what i (and most important, others) heard.

And NO, there is no "agreeing with Dad" (my son does not have the same tastes as i have to begin with) and i NEVER asked anything after a mod, that's part of the game
Another when it comes to my son is that he owns the same amp, only with the firsts mods.

[pdf64]

Subject may well get bored during a bad track and think about sex.

[pdf64]

' i don't hear a different amp each day, nor does my son, and my friends do not have the feeling of playing a different BJ or Blues Deluxe every morning...but they do when i change Polypros for PIOs etc.
So that is non-sense, you are saying that i should, and i do not.'
My take is that our brains act to normalise what we hear, such that we are able to recognise sounds rather than get confused and waste time processing the differing acoustic environment; so by the time you get to your amp, your brain has 're-calibrated' your hearing. If something causes you to consciously re-assess what is actually being heard (eg the damn guitar won't sustain / is sustaining beautifully today) then it's possible to consciously appraise timbre (by comparing it to memory) in the new acoustic environment.
Also the 'auto-recal' process postulated above may get re-set, perhaps due the Fletcher-Munson effect, if the acoustic level changes. And after that, level shift hearing compression will change perception again.
My feeling is that our perception of reality is enormously influenced and affected by neural processes that we may have little or no awareness of; the benefit being that enables us to catch the ball before we actually see it, or avoid the sabre toothed tiger by reacting to subtle, maybe sub-conciously perceived sign of one's presence that we had previously learned.
Pete

[R.G.]

You can always tell a subjectivist - but you can't tell them much.

I highly recommend that everyone who's ever engaged in discussions like this read "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer.

It's a great sendup on how the human mind gets itself deluded by odd facts, and how that remains ingrained, as well as some ways to think about whether to believe or not believe a provocative anecdote.

Of course, subjectivists will reject the reasoning there because they know a priori that they are right, therefore anything that is different from their existing belief is wrong.

Weird.

[defaced]

If you're interested in how the brain works, this book is worth the 15 bucks it will cost to get to your door: Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind. Gospel? No. Good fodder for consideration? Yes. I have not finished the book yet, but what I have read is directly applicable to the supporting the "your brain is not a reliable measurement instrument" argument. To paraphrase a quote from the book: The principal use of your brain is to predict the future. Or put a different way, your brain will fill in blanks where it expects to see them. My interpretation from what I've read so far: Our brain, being both a feed forward and feed back mechanism, doesn't really have the ability to exactly repeat a perception is difficult. Close approximation, yes. Exact, no. Science, by its very definition, is rather exact.

[kleuck]

My take is that our brains act to normalise what we hear

That's obvious, and not only the brain, but the ear by itself in very simple purely mechanical ways.
That's the very reason why i don't tell a word to other people when i want to see their reaction, and the very reason why i prefer to let people play my modded stuff before making my choice.
Anyway, that's not because our brain/ear acts to compress our perception thats there is nothing more in the world.
Actually, the main action of our senses being compression, the differences (if any) should be LESSENED and it's non-sense to think that unaware people can hear a difference at first hear and spontaneously express themselves about that.
Added to that, i expected a lot from PIO in some places, and have been very disappointed : i do not believe "a priori" ; i though they were "THE best cap", and they are not, neither is any other cap, but some can be slightly better sometimes in the right places and for your taste, that's all.

Anyway, i don't care, my DMM is a very very useful tool, so is my cap meter, but i don't make amps for them.

[R.G.]

I'll have to get a copy of that.

The 'guessing the future' is really pertinent. A false positive about there being a dangerous situation (i.e. predator!) coming is a benign problem whereas a false negative is censored by evolution. The ones who had false negatives did not reproduce as much, being digested at an early age.

[Danelectron]

That explains why rumors grow. Everyone hears something a bit different and depending on your experiences or expectations what you hear can really vary.

A friend told me a joke which I repeated at the bar...A guy goes fishing and runs out of worms. He sees a cottonmouth with a frog in it's mouth so he grabs it by the neck and pulls the frog out and throws it in his bait bucket. Now he has to get rid of this pissed off snake so he pours some beer down its throat. After a bit, the snake goes limp and he throws it off in the weeds and starts fishing with the frog. A bit later the fisherman feels a nudge on his boot. The cottonmouth is back with two more frogs. (Thanks Big_Teee)

Not ten minutes later as the joke was retold, the cottonmouth became a water moccasin. They are the same thing, but it wasn't told as a water moccasin. The brain saw that in that individual.

edit: I just went back at looked at the original email to me and I repeated beer as the fishermans drink. The original said Jack Daniels. Is my ear flawed?

[kleuck]

EDIT to complete :

Actually, the main action of our senses being compression, the differences (if any) should be LESSENED and it's non-sense to think that unaware people can hear a difference at first hear and spontaneously express themselves about that.

making a mistake because i've told them that something is new, or thinking that something MUST be new, BUT having the exact same description of the differences that i can make myself, all of them being completely non-tech, and strangers to the "PIO/CC/paste what you prefer" Mojo, they are not even aware of this kind of things.

[Steve Conner]

Some months ago I asked you specifically to stop bullying your son

Isn't that a bit of an extreme accusation to make? Playing the audiophile sound game is hardly going to cause psychological damage, it just wastes time and money.

[tedmich]

The facts are : i don't hear a different amp each day, nor does my son, and my friends do not have the feeling of playing a different BJ or Blues Deluxe every morning...but they do when i change Polypros for PIOs etc.
So that is non-sense, you are saying that i should, and i do not.
BTW in France, we have the chance to have a steady line voltage...

Oh now I understand...

will relocate to France and test your hypothesis, ideally after an ear transplant...