I guess some of my 'beef' arises with the fact that '50s Fenders and Gibsons were mass-produced instruments and the electrical components were just parts catalog stuff.
The vintage mystique built up over the years because newer components that were introduced to the market DID sound different, just like the newest whiz-bang amps that had loads of bad built-in effects and not one decent sound. It's a soon-to-be moot point anyway as surface mount components are taking over in every avenue and large passive electronics go the way of dinosaur, along with any hope of repairing anything outside of a pc board swap.
Leo Fender et al will have costed up various wiring options and reached a conclusion that way.
Leo used what was least expensive early on and later had a group of trusted sales reps who were serious players to help discern what was sonically desirable in Fender's products. His early amps were straight out of RCA's tube handbook and his instruments designed around high school physics textbooks providing scale length and component value equations.
If Gibson had chosen the PIO capacitors for purely superior tonal reasons then this would have been included in the marketing blurb! There is a very blurry line between 'nostalgia' and 'actually better' in the case of a lot of this stuff.
Agreed, but there IS actual science to types with passive tone caps in instruments; not so with lots of other sacred cows in the guitar world (why I brought up tubes). PIO were the least expensive option back in the day, but nowadays, they have to be made in small runs as boutique parts. Gibson charges disgustingly exorbitant prices for their PIO offerings (which have been shown to sometimes actually be electrolytics inside of phony exteriors) , but
real PIO caps are a practically extinct part that hasn't been made for large scale use in over 30 years.
Here's a link to a thread from another forum that exposed Gibson's fake PIO caps five years ago. The links have all expired, but you can get the idea.
