Caps. Mallory vs Orange drop vs bumble bees

fastonebaz

Thinking of rewiring my guitar with new pots and caps. Its a gordon smith gs2 deluxe.  Nothing wrong with it at all but i like fiddling.

I'm wondering what your experiences of any of these caps before/after tone changes. 

Cheers

Ps i searched but there's some dude whose username is mallory which kinda distorted the results a bit

Rabs

I have only used Paper in Oil or the Orange Drop type...

Its a tough subject to approach since we all have different taste. But to my ears I find that Orange Drop types can be a bit hard sounding but Paper in Oil ones give you a more soft/warmer sound...

Never tried Mallory.

Adam_MD

I genuinely don’t believe anyone can hear a difference if the values are the same.  I’m pretty sure the diffferences some people hear are because they either want there to be a difference so hear one or because the values between the different caps are off.

I usually default to orange drop because they’re inexpensive and look cool.  I’ve used paper in oil a few times purely for the mojo.

Oh and bumble bees are just a fancy casing round a regular cap so don’t waste your money unless you really want it to look authentic and don’t care about the cost.  

ICBM

I’ve done some direct-switching testing on this and there is no difference in tone whatever unless the value is different - by at least the standard tolerance on caps, not just if you can measure a small difference.

Adam_MD said:

Oh and bumble bees are just a fancy casing round a regular cap so don’t waste your money unless you really want it to look authentic and don’t care about the cost.  

I’ve always been interested to know whether any of the people who bought the repro Bumblebees and claimed they could hear an improvement (usually along the lines of ‘night and day’ or ‘really opened the tone up’) then noticed the guitar suddenly sounding worse again when they were later revealed to be modern polypropylene caps in Bumblebee casings...

Chalky

But @ICBM, you can only hear the difference if you..... B E L I E V E ! (Choir of angels backing singers sing a four note motif)

slacker

When I had the LP pickups changed I asked Charlie Chandler if it was worth paying for Bumble Bees. He said it wasnt worth it. I had Callaham Mustard caps put in and they sound great. 

IMHO get quality components that are not too expensive.