The Cap’s New Clothes
Today, let’s take a look at some really fancy boutique tone capacitors. You can hear these in the yesterday’s tone cap shootout.
The Luxe Grey Tiger is billed as “a faithful recreation of the famous Cornell-Dubilier Grey Tiger from 1956” and typically sells for about $40.
The Gibson Bumblebee is marketed as being “specially designed to replicate the original parts used by Gibson in the late 1950s”, and typically sells for over $100 for a 2-pack.
Have you ever wondered what special manufacturing and fabrication techniques they use to make these ultra-boutique capacitors?
Well, Steve over at Kernel of Wisdom has taken a knife to the little guys. And what have we here? Inside a Gibson Repro Bumblebee is really a Wesco polypropylene film cap, all wrapped up in black and stripes And inside a Luxe Grey Tiger, we find a General Instruments PIO cap.
Consider that a typical polypropylene film cap sells for maybe fifty cents. Gibson is selling this for about $50, so let’s see— that’s only a about a 10,000% markup 🙂
Here’s an interesting letter from 2004 about the reissue bumblebees from Edwin Wilson, Historic Program Manager at Gibson, as well as another tear-down of the reissue bumblebee.
This is not to say that these caps don’t sound good. However, what is clear to me (as if it wasn’t clear already) is that there is very little reason to spend this kind of money on a capacitor, unless you’ve got money to burn and it gives you warm fuzzies inside 🙂
