I hesitate to post this. $45 Thunderbird pickups.

[Alanko]

My partner's father used to work in 'outside broadcasting'. They were clearing out their loft space recently, and he found some decades old unused NOS KT88s in a box. Knowing I play guitar, he asked if I had no use for them and if they had any value. 

[gearHed289]

I think we just have to wait for this to die naturally, like cryogenically treated strings, active pickups, alu cone speakers and black hardware

[drbassman]

I appreciated the Stew Mac video for what it was, showing folks a way to compare caps at home with ease.  Didn't really really get anything else out of it and I've been using the same cap for years in all my builds.  I'm happy.

[lowend1]

My partner's father used to work in 'outside broadcasting'. They were clearing out their loft space recently, and he found some decades old unused NOS KT88s in a box. Knowing I play guitar, he asked if I had no use for them and if they had any value. 

Well, if you don't want them, I will give them a good home - and pay for the shipping

[Dave W]

I had a laugh yesterday when I found the following link:

http://www.martinsixstringcustoms.com/collections/prewired-gibson-wiring-harnesses/products/prewired-les-paul-holy-grail-harness

I see they've all sold! Yesterday there was drop-down boxes with options. I could have purchased a pre-aged harness. Does that means the pots crackle and the caps have drifted off their reported values by ~ 50% or so?

In all fairness to the guy, he has a great reputation, and those are a very small part of his business. He sells lots of different prewired harnesses with closer tolerances than you get buying typical off-the-shelf parts. Most of them are vintage-accurate, and that's important to some of his customers.

[Alanko]

Fair play to the guy.  I feel a lot happier when my instruments are kitted out with full-size pots and chunky orange drop caps. I follow a similar guy on Instagram who will wire up a full Jazzmaster pickguard with the sort of wiring dress you would expect in a tube amp. It might not necessarily sound better but it looks the part. Conversely I'm uncomfortable with the idea that some of my lesser basses have kludged together wiring harnesses looms I made from scrounged components, to be honest. I just see wiring harnesses as something I can make cheaper myself. I have a variable temp soldering iron, heat sinks and a big book of wiring diagrams. 

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. Leo Fender et al will have costed up various wiring options and reached a conclusion that way. 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.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

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.

[Dave W]

Just because someone says something silly like "well I find a 0.022 sounds a bit more buttery than a 0.047...", as you put it, that doesn't mean there wasn't a change or that a different type of cap might have changed the sound. Poke fun at that, fine, but changing almost anything on an instrument affects it in some way. Sometimes it's not readily apparent, sometimes it's obvious. The confirmation bias of a guy who spent the money on it doesn't mean that changes don't matter.

[Alanko]

My point about buttery caps was more about the refusal for guitarists to acknowledge nanofarads as a unit of capacitance. 

[drbassman]

My basses always sound better after I change my underwear......

[patman]

I absolutely don't understand the difference...I always dime the tone control and control tone either from the amp, or the combo of pickups used.  If I dime the tone control, aren't I , in essence, bypassing whatever cap is in there?

[Highlander]

My basses always sound better after I change my underwear......

you owe me a new keyboard...!

Life is so much easier with none of this tone-control nonsense... and minimising on the metal on the neck... much less to fret about...

[Dave W]

My point about buttery caps was more about the refusal for guitarists to acknowledge nanofarads as a unit of capacitance. 

Wait, what? You expect musicians to know math and how to convert units? That's asking a bit much!   When a vendor lists an item as .047 microfarads, most people aren't going to mentally convert it to nanofarads.

I absolutely don't understand the difference...I always dime the tone control and control tone either from the amp, or the combo of pickups used.  If I dime the tone control, aren't I , in essence, bypassing whatever cap is in there?

Unless you have a no-load tone pot -- the ones that cut the pot and capacitor out of the circuit when it's on 10 -- then the you aren't actually bypassing the cap. But as long as you're diming your tone control, different caps won't change a thing b/c you're not rolling anything off.

[Pilgrim]

My basses always sound better after I change my underwear......

Fond of the brown tone, are ye? 

[lowend1]

My pickups are still in China