how much will a "cap job" affect tone?

[coolhand78]

reading thru gerald weber's book, he highly recommends having a cap job done on any new fender amps as apparently they use the cheapest caps known to man...

He recommends that the caps be replaced with sprague capacitors...

just wondering what peoples thoughts are on this?

cheers.

[Blue Strat]

It depends on how bad the original caps are.

The range is from not at all to quite a lot. When it does change, the amp will tend to have tighter low end and more headroom.

In 100s of cap jobs done I've never had a customer who was dissatisfied. I have read about people complaining about the increased headroom. What this says is that they really don't like the amp for what it was meant to be and that their old caps were in dangerous condition.

One thing's for sure, if your old caps take out one of your transformers the amp will NEVER sound like it did and the value will drop considerably if it's a vintage amp.

[coolhand78]

what about new caps in new fender amps? are caps like tubes in that poor tubes = poor tone and crap caps = crap tone...? (tone being subjective of course) but generally speaking? :)

[Blue Strat]

I wouldn't bother with it until they're 10 years old. I'm sure there will be differing opinions.

[tommytomcat]

If you're going to want to go to the trouble of recapping a PCB amp, you'd be better off yanking out all the PCB crap and have a hoffman or similar board installed. You're going to void the warranty.. why not do it good. FWIW... I use W#bers cheap smallish electrolytics in my amp builds. I can't tell any difference noise/hum wise in those amps compared to my amps that have those big honking Sprague blue caps in them. Some may argue this point, to my ears the micro mini coupling caps that are used in PCB amps don't sound anywhere near as good as the larger film/foil types used in higher end hardwired amps.

[coolhand78]

If you're going to want to go to the trouble of recapping a PCB amp, you'd be better off yanking out all the PCB crap and have a hoffman or similar board installed. You're going to void the warranty.. why not do it good. FWIW... I use W#bers cheap smallish electrolytics in my amp builds. I can't tell any difference noise/hum wise in those amps compared to my amps that have those big honking Sprague blue caps in them. Some may argue this point, to my ears the micro mini coupling caps that are used in PCB amps don't sound anywhere near as good as the larger film/foil types used in higher end hardwired amps.

the 64 vibroverb custom is PTP... apparently...

[TungstenAmp]

the 64 vibroverb custom is PTP... apparently...

And it is loaded with the cheapest caps known to man. I went through one of those for a customer and replaced the tone stack caps with OD's. While the results are subjective, I did hear a change for the better. (i.e. more presence, tighter bass response, clear highs)

The customer decided to take it two steps further, so I installed a Mercury Magnetics Vibroverb OT and a 15" Weber Alnico California, doped on both sides to best replicate an original JBL. The amp definitely has a vibe now.

[coolhand78]

thanks for that, i'm actually considering replacing the OT and trying to hunt down a JBL D130F for it... is it worth doing all the caps? or just the tone ones?

cheers

[pfrischmann]

Get dsome Pics and I bet we can help more.
I would actually start with the speaker before the elctronics.

[BenH]

I know a guy who forked out a small fortune for a 1950's Bassman, and was so happy that at last he had found the tone he was looking for, but it was rather noisey, so to make it reliable for touring with he had it recapped. Afterwards he was so unhappy with the results, that he resold it. Silly bugger.
I don't know who did the recap for him, but if he had taken the effort to measured up the drifted values of the old caps, he could have obtained a similar sounding but quiet and reliable result from the new caps.
Ben.