I'm glad you posted that. I simply cannot bring myself to believe that a bit of electronics that falls within certain specs has any discernible difference from any similar bit with the same specs...

There are many who will praise certain caps for imparting a magical tone and I just don't get it. Electronically in a guitar tone circuit, the capacitor's role is determining the cutoff frequency sent to ground. In other words, the output of your guitar never passes though the capacitor in a standard tone circuit. Actually the inverse occurs, the signal passing through the cap is going to ground and is not heard. So how can a cap have "tone" when what you hear never passes through the cap? I'd love to try a double blind test some day to see if anyone could could tell a difference...

I've seen this before. Listen to the vid without reading the caps and see how different they sound. The difference is largely inconsequential, no way I could pick out one which was any better than the rest or even really different other than a few sounding a touch darker (one cap at least one did not spec the same and another I don't believe he even stated the value). Also, how did he judge the cap values? Did he actually measure them to ensure they were all the same as there is variance even on new caps. I stand by my statement, there are a great many mods which can radically alter a guitar's tone. A cap ain't one of them. Any player with some years under their belt could create a greater variance in tone by simply modifying the angle of pick attack.

This topic actually brings up a few issues, so here's some scattered thoughts in reply.

In a powered circuit, two caps that spec out essentially the same may respond quite differently. In such a situation, therefore, it could well make a difference whether it's mylar or "lemon drop" or disk or whatever.

But in a passive & weak circuit like rolling off pickup tone, it really can't make much nevermind. True, if you're talking supermegahot humbuckers, the sort that could darned near spark a gap if you nail a power chord, maybe that's enough juice to make a discernible difference. But a vintage-spec PAF? Nah.

What catches me here is the fraud that Gibson is perpetrating. Bad enough that they're selling a vastly overpriced gewgaw as somehow "just like the original," but looking at that two-shot, you'd think that their counterfeit would at least look like what it's SUPPOSED to look like. Jeez -- if I'm gonna pay (at all) for a forgery, I'd at least want a GOOD forgery.

It capitalizes on ignorance. IME, plain ol' caps -- not electrolytic -- last bloody forever unless they're actually cracked or exploded. I've reused caps from 1930s radio circuits!! The exception would be really ancient waxed-paper jobbies, but even many of those would do just fine in a passive circuit. It'd make a LOT more sense to spec a "classic" cap for its actual capacitance, & find something on the shelf that tests to the same value.

Every fool with more money than sense thinks he's going to "recap" stuff & magically get some "classic" tone. I wouldn't encourage this... but if some halfwit's waving his $100 in my face, I'd be glad to do the work.

In working guitars, I prefer to replace brown ceramic disks with greenies, because the former get pretty beat-up with the years; I've pulled a few that were snapped in half. Greenies are cheap & common, & in passive tone circuits I can't see where bright colors (orange, yellow, bumblebee) will make a difference.

I do like the color orange, green, or yellow better than the tannish brown. So it must sound better right?