Jensen Audio caps, worth the money?

[R.G.]

I have since used white ones, yellow ones, blue ones, black ones, some other black ones and some orange ones. Oh, and some red ones. They all sound good in the projects I used them in. I have found the big difference is in the numbers printed on them.

This reminds me of an incident from my technical childhood. I was a newly minted engineerling working on power supplies in the lab one day, and the department secretary (yep- this was back when departments had secretaries) walked into the lab and asked "Guys - what color are capacitors?".

[Jazz P Bass]

I was involved with the pilot marketing for Monster Cable, lol. Their marketing engineers could spout specs and drivel all day. In practice you could not tell the difference between a Monster speaker cable, claymore mine cable, or romex at audio frequencies. .

WooHoo!
Claymore mine cable.
I got a chuckle out of that one.
Thanks.

[olddawg]

WooHoo!
Claymore mine cable.
I got a chuckle out of that one.
Thanks.

I was in San Diego. Big military presence. The best man at my wedding was a Seal Team Master Chief. He used to give me miles of the stuff so I actually used it for blind tests. It was stranded alloyed steel wire. (Guess its tough). No body could tell the difference. After a few drinks in private the Monster engineers would tell you it was all hype and marketing. But.... on the stump they would boast about inter element capacitance and all the other technobabble all day long. And gold ends! Had to be the gold plated connectors to go with the gold played ears!

[jpfamps]

What I find interesting in all these "discussions" about sonic merits of electronic components, is that the "best" option co-incidentally (or not?) just happens to be the most expensive......

[olddawg]

What I find interesting in all these "discussions" about sonic merits of electronic components, is that the "best" option co-incidentally (or not?) just happens to be the most expensive......

So it goes like this.... If a $50 bottle of wine is good , then a $500 bottle of wine is great! So... A $5000 bottle of wine has to be exquisite. And of course, only discerning palates can tell the difference. Lol. Unfortunately, electronics is not wine...And its pretty subjective even for wine as well! Those special humans at work again. You need an "educated" palate.

[loudthud]

Virtually nobody will spend $130K on a luxury car and then give it a bad review. Most of the bad reviews you see online are from people who bought other luxury cars and then comment on the ones they wish they would have bought or could'nt afford.

[JoeM]

When Larry Carlton says he can hear the difference I'll believe it, but until then....

[kleuck]

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is."
- Yogi Berra

HaHa !

Different caps can sound differently in simple circuits, that's obvious, compare an "all Mallory 150" 5F1 with an "all OD715" one...
Is it worth the price is another problem, i personally use NOS Soviet PIO (toxic, but sealed in glass and cheap) but i don't think they are necessarily "the best" everywhere in an amp, that's pointless : they can be better for your taste in some places and some amps, not everywhere.
I think that just like tubes, best results are when you mix technologies.
In guitars, i prefer PIO though.

[Steve Conner]

Different caps can sound differently in simple circuits, that's obvious, compare an "all Mallory 150" 5F1 with an "all OD715" one...

Is that obvious to you? It's not at all obvious to me. If you build two amps, one with Mallories and the other with orange drops, there are a thousand other reasons why they might sound different. The capacitors would be pretty far down my list of suspects.

[kleuck]

I did not build two, i tried in the same amp, and yes i know blablah, not a double-blind test ; anyway, everybody heard the differences without being aware of the changes, my friends, my sons (and caps within 2%)

[Steve Conner]

That's even worse, because in the time it takes to change out the caps, you and your family and friends have plenty of time to forget what the old caps sounded like. You might also play better because you know you have new caps bursting with mojo.

I'd want to use something like WinABX to compare two recordings, using a speaker simulator to eliminate issues with repeatability of mic placement. Ideally I'd use a "re-amping" technique too, so the input is identical for both recordings.

One of the thousand things on my list: Tube amp circuits have such high impedance that a few pF of stray capacitance can change the tone, or even cause oscillation. (think of the 10pF capacitor in the Deluxe Reverb mixing circuit.)

Different capacitors have different physical sizes and shapes, so they have different stray capacitances to their surroundings. If you swap out some tiny metallised polyester caps for audiophile-grade PP film/foil units that are physically much bigger, I think you could increase all the stray capacitances enough to make an audible difference to the amp's high end.

[kleuck]

Why should they forgot and find an immediate difference without knowing i made changes ? Do you think that a guitarist thinks every time he switches his amp on "Shit ! Something is different ! Some dwarf must have change something when i was asleep !"
So everyday, you find that your amp has a different sound ?
THAT is non-sens actually.

So no experience can be significant to you, fine, you have the faith, i do not.

Farad is farad, fine, so, why are ceramic caps regarded as crappy ?

Compare the curves of the Emi Legend 105 with the Ramrod one : they are identical (minus the efficiency), so they should sound the same ? They do not.

Maybe the brightness of the OD715 has something to do with stray capacitance, but that's cannot be the case for PIO vs Mallory : they have the same shape.

[Steve Conner]

No, it's you who "has the faith", you believe in things that have no scientific explanation.

Ceramic caps (some types, not all) are known to have capacitance that varies according to the voltage across them. This causes a few percent of distortion that is audible. But there are no significant differences between the different kinds of plastic film capacitors. When you push them to the limit in RF and power circuits, or precision sample-and-hold circuits, you can see differences, but as far as a guitar amp circuit is concerned, "farad is farad".

Speaker measurement is a quite different ballgame. The frequency response of a speaker contains an incredible amount of fine detail, the plot is just an approximation. Also, the response is measured at 1m on-axis in an anechoic chamber. The off-axis response could be quite different, and when you play in a room that isn't anechoic, the off-axis response contributes a lot to the sound. Finally, there must be some manufacturing tolerance, not every Ramrod or Legend 105 will have a response identical to the plot, and they will continue to change as they break in. You can't really draw any conclusions from a sample size of one Ramrod and one Legend.

And yes, every day a different sound. Maybe I put the amp back in a different spot when I came home from my last gig, so it couples to the room differently. Or I have the cold and my ears are a bit bunged up, or the strings need replacing, or my plectrum is wearing out, or the line voltage is low because the oven, washing machine and dishwasher are all on, or 995 other things that I would want to control before I even tried investigating "capacitor sound".

[wyatt]

Why should they forgot and find an immediate difference without knowing i made changes ? Do you think that a guitarist thinks every time he switches his amp on "Shit ! Something is different ! Some dwarf must have change something when i was asleep !"
So everyday, you find that your amp has a different sound ?
THAT is non-sens actually.

So no experience can be significant to you, fine, you have the faith, i do not.

Farad is farad, fine, so, why are ceramic caps regarded as crappy ?

Compare the curves of the Emi Legend 105 with the Ramrod one : they are identical (minus the efficiency), so they should sound the same ? They do not.

Maybe the brightness of the OD715 has something to do with stray capacitance, but that's cannot be the case for PIO vs Mallory : they have the same shape.

Not nonsense at all, none of us ever hear the same sound exactly the same way twice. How we perceive sound is directly influenced by the sound we heard right before it or by knowledge since last hearing it (including knowledge gained WHILE last hearing it).

You can have your friends listen to the EXACT same rig multiple times and chances are all of them think they hear a difference at least once. The EXACT same amp can sound warm or it can sound bright or shrill depending on the environment. Sit around listening to a lot of dropped-C modern metal for a while and then plug into a 5E3 and the 5E3 will probably seem very bright; sit around listening to a lot of steel guitar players and plug into that same 5E3 and it'll probably seem very dark. And Steve is right, just changing an amp's position in a room or it's angle to your ears can have as drastic a difference as a speaker change. That's the way our minds work (ALL of our minds). I'm guessing you didn't change caps in the matter of minutes, any tests done days apart are totally worthless.

Tests that aren't A-B and double-blind don't count. And tests that are A-B are going to feature differences that are exaggerated compared to long-term listen and use. Now, if you swapped the caps repeatedly over the span of months, I would curious to know how often they noted the change and how accurately, my guess the results would prove to have a much larger margin of error than you believe as you ONE test. Oh, and 2% tolerance across 5 caps in a 5E3 add up.

I hold that there is a difference in tone between cap styles, and I think people should use what they like. Typically, it's an issue of the shape of the cutoff elbow. My argument is, as long as the cap is suitable for the task at hand (no ceramics or electrolytic as coupling caps, etc.), the differences between them are insignificant compared to cap tolerance and constantly changing perception of what we hear. Back to the original question, the OP would get great results with the Jensens, but he would get near equal results with the Mallory's and have more than enough money left over for a chassis or OT for his next project.

[pdf64]

'So everyday, you find that your amp has a different sound ?'
My band sets up in the same room every week, same kit, same placement and I close mic (DI the bass) and record it.
The acoustic perception is that the sound is significantly different each time; sometimes it's really lively and the guitar feeds back, sometimes the guitar notes die but the damn vocal mic can't get any level before feedback, sometimes everything seems dead etc.
I tried monitoring the temperature and humidity but couldn't find any correlation with the acoustics; it's not even consistent on those rare occasions when the weather is.
The weird thing is that the sound that the mics pick up is remarkably consistent, even given how fininicky guitar speakers are to close mic.
So yes, my experience is expect a different acoustic tone in the room each time, even with every controllable variable nailed down.
Pete