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Sources for NOS Sprague Vitamin Q caps?

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  • Sources for NOS Sprague Vitamin Q caps?

    Anyone know a good source for New Old Stock Sprague Vitamin Q capacitors. I am considering using these to recap the TG in my M3.
    Also, I have wondered about using the "red" caps that come out of some of the L-100's and M-100's. I often see these on ebay for a reasonable price. I have read that these "red" caps are very stable and would work OK. Anyone have experience with this?
    Hammond A-102
    Hammond M3 - project
    Hammond PR-40 tone cabinet
    Leslie 145
    One Leslie 60 and one 70 for use with Rhodes and Wurlitzer piano

  • #2
    Why use old capacitors?

    Comment


    • #3
      http://www.dairiki.org/HammondWiki/T...torReplacement
      I ran across this link in another forum post. After reading through the information, I started considering trying out the NOS Spragues. The cap values for the NOS Spragues and the M100 red mylar caps are very close (or exact) as the original caps in my M3. From what I have read neither the NOS Spragues or the "reds" degrade. (or at least it would be so slow as to not matter in my life time).
      Further, I am obsessed with getting my organ to produce the sound that I hear in my head. The search continues...
      Hammond A-102
      Hammond M3 - project
      Hammond PR-40 tone cabinet
      Leslie 145
      One Leslie 60 and one 70 for use with Rhodes and Wurlitzer piano

      Comment


      • #4
        Film dielectric caps do not degrade, at least since they became popular since 1966. Exception, french scr brand has connection problems. Sprague orange drop caps are still in production. The ones I just bought were made in USA oddly enough. They have been bought and have a prefix, vishay. There are sprague 616 and a 617 series. One has steel leads, the other has tin-copper. I forget which is which. newark.com has some, tubesandmore.com has some. Salvage mallories are fine in value but the leads might be too short for you. Free T's, L's, and M's can start your own scrapyard; watch craigslist and look at the picture on the "free curb alert" organs.
        I also bought some vishay roederon film caps last year. They are made in the EU and are beautifully marked with an actual micro with a tail just like they wrote them in physics 201. Another brand of film cap I have made about 1970 holding up well is Texcap. Someone on diyaudio mentioned they are still in business as texas components, will make you custom sizes if you need something the big guys don't stock anymore.
        city Hammond H-182 organ (2 ea),A100,10-82 TC, Wurlitzer 4500, Schober Recital Organ, Steinway 40" console , Sohmer 39" pianos, Ensoniq EPS, ; country Hammond H112

        Comment


        • #5
          I know the reasons people have for replacing the caps, I just don't see any reason to use old capacitors unless you can find them cheaper than new capacitors... in fact, a lot of this sprague-fandom may just be hype caused by orange drop capacitors being used in guitars...

          Comment


          • #6
            http://www.dairiki.org/HammondWiki/T...torReplacement
            Fenrirlupus, Have you read through the data on the link I provided? There is a further link inside the article that shows O scope tests for various type caps. I found it very interesting. I ran your question past my Hammond tech. He thought, for the most part, that many Hammond users would not know the difference in tone between new mylar caps and NOS Sprague Vitamin Q oil/paper caps. However, He thought Hammond tone nuts like me would hear a warmer tone on the higher notes if NOS Sprague Vitamin Q's were used. He suggested, (if I were determined to make a test), just trying the Vitamin Q caps on the upper tones if I thought new mylar caps sounded a little harsh.
            I am going to install in my M3 a set of red caps that I am about to take out of a salvage TG. After testing the sound of the reds, I will install the NOS Vitamin Q caps for the higher tones and re-test. I will update with info as I get it
            Hammond A-102
            Hammond M3 - project
            Hammond PR-40 tone cabinet
            Leslie 145
            One Leslie 60 and one 70 for use with Rhodes and Wurlitzer piano

            Comment


            • #7
              As a guitar player since my teenage days 0ver 25 years ago I came into organ playing some 12 years ago with electronic knowledge from a guitar players perspective. I've built a few amps and even done some mods to my Hammond S6 chord organ. The chord buttons can sound like a Les Paul through a nice Fender Princeton...but I still prefer stock for some reason. I've mellowed in my middle age. Hell, I'll admit it, I want to play 1930's music on a Thomas Trianon Theater organ til my last breath.
              Anyway, on guitar amps different brands of caps sound better with different tube configurations/transformers used/ and speaker configurations. Not all capacitors are created equal. My favorite are the 'mustard' capacitors made by Phillips that were found in early Marshall, Hi-Watt, and Sound City amplifiers. Those three were British amp companies. These amps have plenty of transparency in the tone and have plenty of bite. There is no mush on the attack. Searing tone like David Gilmore's in Pink Floyd is the closest thing to mellow that the mustard capacitors produce. The Blue 'Fender' molded plastic caps are also out there and are similar to the red mylar capacitors. Old Thomas tube organs made near the Fender plant in Sepulveda California used these blue molded caps. I have a bunch of them I got out of the only organ I've had to salvage this year ( out of six). It's a Thomas TL-1 from 1961. Cool organ and a real shame to have to tare apart, but it came to me in a shambles. I'm cutting down the cabinet and making it into a powered Leslie cabinet. It has a factory Leslie that came standard on the organ so I am just narrowing the organ around it and leaving room between the organ lid and the top of the Leslie for the organs tube amp with it's three 12ax7's and two power tubes similar to el84's. I might try to squeeze an upper rotor into the top and mound the amp along the side of the Leslie. Then I can open the organ top with it's hinges so the rotor is exposed. Could even make it raise up when the lid is opened. See folks, everything gets re-used. Speaking of Thomas organs. I have a Thomas Californian 263. It is AMAZING!!!! Any Californian spinet is worth getting. Pure addictive transistor bliss. I mean it- even a built-in genuine Thomas Organ Company wah pedal, just hit the Wah tab and then the wah is active at the full forward position just past full volume on the pedal. Their photo-cell stereo 'Tremulent' is wonderful. They also have a quadraphonic Californian, but believe me, any Californian spinet is great. The Theater Californian is LSI and a different beast all together. I have one, but I have never heard it except when I bought it, but it has problems...I'll get to it.
              VitaminQ capacitors are probably not all that necessary, but I'm just going by guitar amp design. I have some, but not enough of the same value.
              I picked up a 58' M3 with a neat little feature yesterday for a whopping $75! Not a scratch on it. The feature is on the right cheek block and is a stacked pair of aluminum paddle switches- one is aluminum color and the other is a light yellowish gold anodized color to the aluminum. These switches select 16 different pre-sets for each manual, and there is 'draw bar' at 12 o'clock and 'cancel' at 6 o'clock, for a total of 256 different pre-set combinations. The device is called 'Duet Sixteen' and was manufactured by a company called Electro-Tone. They were based in Santa Monica California and had a couple thousand affiliate locations that offered the installation of their product. Or the player could install it themselves. It's fairly straight forward. Someone began a post about it the same day I got the organ a couple days ago. They also offered reverb and percussion retrofit kits as well as a single knob- 'Sixteen' pre-set for the M Hammond and others that didn't have tab pre-sets.
              Wurlitzer '46' Model 31 Orgatron & 310 rotary cab, 56' 4410 , 65' 4300
              Hammond '55' S6 Chord Organ,HR-40,ER-20, 1971 X66/& 12-77 tone cabinet w/ 122 kit & TREK Transposer- of which I've retrofitted a Wurlitzer/Lowrey 'PedAL gLIdE' awesome!
              Gulbransen 61' 1132 '76' Rialto II & Leslie 705 + two 540
              Conn '57' 406 Caprice '59' 815 Classic (the 29th 815)
              PLEASE SAVE THE WURLITZER ELECTROSTATIC CONTINUOUS-FREE-REED ORGANS 1953'-1961' Hammond TW's ONLY TRUE COMPETITOR! (Ggl> NSHOS WURLI 4600)

              Comment


              • #8
                technical people tend to measure caps not by brand, but by capacitance, parasitic inductance, and series resistance. Life comes into it, but most brands of plastic film cap have equivalent lives. For example, if your vitamin Q caps have a different sound and lower series resistance than an orange drop, then you will have to use the selector tables of newark or somebody to find a 400VDC or more cap with that lower ESR. If the vitamin Q has higher series resistance, the it is simply a matter of inserting a 1/8 watt resistor in series with each, or buying something equivalently poor (lower ESR costs more) . Same thing with inductance, different caps have different readings, and buying historic salvage caps is not the only way to get what you want. Modern film caps for sale tend to group by type of plastic film, with polyester being cheap and compact and polyprophylene being more expensive and bigger. I just recapped my PAS2 preamp, and except for the paper ones that were deteriorated by a punctured wax case, the difference in sound between polyester and polyprophylene is not detectable on my speakers. All the plastic caps are a bitt more trebelly than the paper, and I am thinking about going back and purchasing .20 uf ones like original instead of the .22 uf that were available, although running with the trebel tone controls down a bit is a lot less labor intensive. Instead, my biggest concern is arcing on the PAS2 PCB, causing crackles. I will try to repair that first (for the tenth time).
                Suggest when you do experiments, look up the ESR and inductance online of the commercially available stuff to guide you future purchase decisions. Vitamin Q, 1960's mallory red film, you would have to measure with a CLR bridge, unless someone online has done that work already. Enzo of diyaudio.com and music-electronics-forum.com has a lot informed opinions on caps, as does JCurl of the first forum. Enzo knows more about guitar amps, JCurl more about hi-fi.
                Almost nobody is manufacturing paper dielectric caps, at this time. There are some premium vendors like Jupiter selling stacked plastic film caps, which have lower self inductance than wound caps. Depending on whether your offensively bright modern caps are series or parallel with your signal, I would suspect that the excessive trebel is lower self inductance of modern wound caps, not higher. So stacked caps would make this trebel excess worse. If more parasitic inductance is what you need, winding the leads around each end of the cap instead of cutting them off would tend to increase inductance. You can also increase inductance in a circuit by replacing any carbon composition resistors, which were made with a paste, with carbon film resistors, which have a spiral photographically produced element.
                Last edited by indianajo; 01-01-2011, 05:33 PM.
                city Hammond H-182 organ (2 ea),A100,10-82 TC, Wurlitzer 4500, Schober Recital Organ, Steinway 40" console , Sohmer 39" pianos, Ensoniq EPS, ; country Hammond H112

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by Juan View Post
                  However, He thought Hammond tone nuts like me would hear a warmer tone on the higher notes if NOS Sprague Vitamin Q's were used.
                  Define "warmer." If you want a less harsh, darker timbre, then all you need is higher capacitance. If you replace the old caps with new caps that have the specs the originals had at the time of manufacture, you'll get a brighter, harsher timbre.

                  Remember also that this isn't the exact same thing as replacing amp capacitors-- which, by the way, you could do if you wanted to.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Wow! I'm afraid I'm not a technical person. The original caps in my M3 are .105uf 200VDC and .25uf 200 VDC. The red mylar caps I am taking from the salvage L100 are .1uf 100VDC and .25uf 100VDC. There are plenty of Vitamin Q caps that are.1uf 100VDC. Are these not correct for my application?
                    Hammond A-102
                    Hammond M3 - project
                    Hammond PR-40 tone cabinet
                    Leslie 145
                    One Leslie 60 and one 70 for use with Rhodes and Wurlitzer piano

                    Comment

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