Tonefiend Forum

You haven't seen the Gibson Bumblebees that sell for $125 , same thing. Cheap ass chinese garbage with striped covers.They been doing that stuff for years now.

We used to see this sort of thing from a couple of importers even back in the 1980's for replacements in hifi amps. To be honest the power supply filter caps with this sort of replacement were Ok as long as they could handle the voltage. Also anything inside the feedback loop made trivial if any difference for the most part. This is based on listening tests, you couldn't really measure a difference. However if I was paying for Bumblebees I would be irked for sure if they were other caps in disguise. But the thing is a lot of the old caps even new were pretty variable in actual capacitance, leakage and trasient response sometimes the less perfect ones could sound more pleasing to the ear even if the were less accurate. It used to be some caps were rated at -20% | +100% for the capacitance voltage ratings were usually plus or minus 20-25%. As we used to say close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and capacitors. For me the bottom line is the actual sound produced by the amp, I always trust my ears over esoteric measurements and with guitar amps the proof was in the guitar playing. I always played an amp while playing backing tracks or music thru a PA to simulate something close to stage condition. Sometimes I would use the amp at band practice in my basement studio to test mods etc. it was amazing the stuff you would find. I used to keep a orbital sander with an extra piece of rubber on it clamped to the chassis or even FX pedal during bench test to simulate performance conditions. I found a lot of problems that way including microphonic caps replacing them made a huge difference and it mostly occured with American made caps rather than foreign made. That may be due to modern techniques more than anything.