I've been approached by a maker of high end capacitors to try some out in passive treble cut guitar circuits. My prejudice is to believe that you cannot hear the difference between one cap of a given value and another given that they are treble bleed and are literally not in the signal path. I think that the differences that people claim to hear are because of tighter tolerances, etc.; in other words, there is another explanation for one cap sounding different from the other than the quality of the cap itself.
But, not to be fooled by my prejudices, I'm going to set up a double or even triple blind test to see and hear what's what.
I'll put capacitor toggle switches into a couple of guitars and even wire the switches in reverse from one another...forward or up will be cap A in one guitar, cap B in the other. Then I'll turn the guitars over to someone who has no idea of which way is which, and they will flip the switches while yet another person plays the guitars. The pots will be the same and won't switch. I'll test pots for resistance. I'll test the caps and get them within 2%. Then we'll play and test with the pots wide open, closed all the way down, and at some sort of mid positions. I could even test resistance of the mid positions by bringing a couple of test terminals up to the surface of the guitars.
Am I missing anything here?
But, not to be fooled by my prejudices, I'm going to set up a double or even triple blind test to see and hear what's what.
I'll put capacitor toggle switches into a couple of guitars and even wire the switches in reverse from one another...forward or up will be cap A in one guitar, cap B in the other. Then I'll turn the guitars over to someone who has no idea of which way is which, and they will flip the switches while yet another person plays the guitars. The pots will be the same and won't switch. I'll test pots for resistance. I'll test the caps and get them within 2%. Then we'll play and test with the pots wide open, closed all the way down, and at some sort of mid positions. I could even test resistance of the mid positions by bringing a couple of test terminals up to the surface of the guitars.
Am I missing anything here?
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