Inductor Showdown

[ESPm2M]

Perhaps we should make this a one-stop reference - whos in?

[ESPm2M]

To start it off, is the Vox 847 inductor more similar to the fasel red or yellow? How do the Dunlop fasels compare to the Fulltone Clyde? Stack-o-dimes?

thanks

[R.G.]

I've reposted my reply to a similar but more ambitious "best" list from a couple of days ago at the bottom of this reply. The poster wanted to do just this, but for all components, not just inductors.

If you were measuring something measurable, like the inductance, resistance, size, etc., that would be one thing. But measuring "tone goodness" is IMHO a futile effort at best, and probably a disservice to others at worst.  The problem is that human hearing is not a reliable measurer, and people's opinions are not reliable reflections of what is actually heard, and that there is variation in parts that needs to be accounted for.

Getting opinions about inductors is good and laudable, but IMHO it needs to be just that, a list of opinions with no implied ranking separated from the people who gave the opinions.

For instance: Adam, Bill, and Charles give you opinions on Fasel, TDK, and SOD inductors, ranking them according to their preferences as best, middle, and worst. You are almost certain to find circular rankings which make it impossible to get a "best" based only on those opinions. With more people and more choices, the incidence of circularity goes up hugely.

Note that this is a result of humans being humans, not the actual stuff under consideration. Votes don't help this one; the observations in this come right out of game theory modelling for elections. You can force subdividing votes, but that usually forces non-conforming results and often results in the least-disliked, not the most liked choice (hey! that should sound familiar to us now).

IMHO (note that!) the whole concept of subjective shootouts is flawed. Everybody has an opinion. It's worth exactly the same as every other one. Oh yeah - opinions are free. What does economics say about stuff that has a zero price?

=============================================

...sigh...

It's near impossible to get any two people to agree on what sounds good, let alone which parts sound good.

Oh, there are people who will tell you that Von Klauswitz's Beezwax Kreme wire insulation will keep gamma rays off the wires and that will make your sound "smoother" with better "inner detail" and that it will "remove a veil around the notes". These people usually want a lot of money for whatever they're peddling, too.

You've come up with a well-intentioned idea, but I think it may be impractical for a number of reasons.
(1) the same parts make for better or worse sound, depending on the rest of the circuit; example, carbon composition resistors versus metal film. In high voltage amps, there exist some places where CC's have some beneficial sound. In effects, they just add noise. Germanium transistors are not magic tone makers, they just happen to work well in a few older fuzz pedals. In anything else, they add noise, unreliability, and thermal drift, as well as price.
(2) the same part type is made by many manufacturers, and they may not be marked as to manufacturer, date, etc., making the opinions useless even if they were accurate to some objective scale; worse, the inherent variation in semiconductors from batch to batch, even in the same part number and manufacturer makes consistency impossible. Beyond that, components degrade with time, and they do so depending on circuit operations; for instance, bipolar transistors get noticably noiser if their base-emitter junction is reverse-broken even once, and some circuits do this every time they're turned off.
(3) Using the "best" transistor, the "best" capacitor, the "best" opamp, and the "best" resistors may not result in good sound. The circuit will go ahead and do what Mother Nature's rules say it should, and that may or may not be musical. Combinations of subtle cork-sniffing vintage components from authenticated provenances don't necessarily make good sound, and it is certain that one can't add a hint of smoothness to, say, distortion by adding some "smoother" resistors, and spicing it up with some "hotter" capacitors.
(4) you can't get enough opinions to construct a statistically significant guide
(5) personal opinions, which is what you'll likely get, are notoriously unreliable. The hifi community has been arguing for almost a century now over what is good sound. They still haven't reached any conclusions. Here's another good illustration of opinion reliability: musicologists have done repeatable lab tests where they have shown that people from different cultures hear musical intervals differently. All people **don't even necessarily hear the same tune when it's played to them at the same time**. How can they tell they like MegaBlatt's resistors better?

That being said, there are a few things that we have learned about parts.
(a) use low noise resistors, like metal film, for high gain applications. The maker doesn't seem to matter much
(b) use low-dielectric constant capacitors where you can; prefer teflon, polystyrene > polypropylene > polycarbonate > polyester (mylar) > paper > aluminum electro > aluminum NP > tantalum, high dielectric ceramic for the audio chain
(c) corrosion and bad contacts always seem to sound bad
(d) use circuits that do not degrade components by zapping them sublethally
(e) Bad layout can make even a good circuit sound or behave badly.

As I said, you have good intentions, but I think it may be impractical to make a list of the good, better, and best parts.

[RedHouse]

I agree with RG, "tone" is like shoes and other things of personal preference ...everybody likes different things.

We can try to establish metrics on things of personal taste but in the end it's all just that, personal taste.

[RedHouse]

whoops, pushed the submit button too soon...

I have a VOX 847 that I made my own PCB for which has room on it for a Red Fasel, the old TDK which was salvaged from a broken pedal, and a halo inductor, with those and the extra resistors and caps I have included (and switches) my wah can actually sound just like nearly any wah, Thomas, Dunlop, VOX, Clyde, JH etc.