Please note, I realize a lot of this is tongue in cheek, but I'm trying to embrace the root of the subject.
Zork wrote:authentic sound
This is largely a figment of imagination.
Let's take a ride in the wayback machine, to an era in which a lot of electronic components had multiple stages of "human intervention" during their construction.
Part tolerances are all over the place. Whether it is a resistor, a capacitor, or a transistor...
Parts are built, and heaped into the QC department. Transistors are then tested, and stuff that tests to one level is stuck into a bin of similar parts, while stuff that tests to another level is stuck in a different bin. These different bins are allocated different part numbers, and ultimately different price points.
Does the manufacturing company have a government contract? If so, expect better tested components to just vaporize into the military industrial complex, where they will undergo another round of testing and the good parts will be used up and the fail/lesser parts will enjoy value markups decades later by optimistic junk dealers.
What are we doing, making amps sound like
that? Jesus, the shit kids listen to these days, grab a bin of the cheapest junk and get to work.
Meanwhile in the resistor factory, a similar process unfolds. We have a batch of "100K" carbon comp resistors. Test them all. Is it within 1% of 100K? Oh good, I already have a buyer for those.. 5% get a gold band, 10% get a silver band, dump the rest out into this lot...
That lot which has had everything within 10% of an accurate value already filtered out.
Repeat at the capacitor factory, you know, in between bouts of pouring PCB contaminated oils down the sewer grate out front.
So, TL;DR a lot of the values packed into an old, build by hand fuzz box way back in the dawning of fuzz boxes is already all over the place. Germanium transistors are going to change their behaviour depending on how hot it happens to be that day, carbon comps are going to soak in humidity resulting in micro non-designated conductive paths, and capacitors are going to have shown up to the party a hot and sloppy mess.
So what is authentic sound then? Is it the sound in an air conditioned recording studio in 1967? Is it the sound in the same studio while the AC is broken in 1968? Is it the sound of some poor pedal suffering under noon day sun after having had the 16th beer spilled on it while it feeds a tube amp hanging off a suffering generator putting out 98 volts AC during an LSD soaked weekend?
Is it any of those after 40-50 years of component degradation?
I realize this may be an unpopular opinion, but I feel that, at this point - nothing is authentic where sound is concerned.
But yeah, it can still sound cool.
Zork wrote:Does a ceramic disc capacitor sound any different to a film capacitor?
Typically, yes. Capacitors are a physical object, that impart their effect on an electrical field through the physical assembly of conductive elements and insulating elements. Ceramic disc plates are going to have different reactive characteristics to the array of internal and external influences than a rolled film suspended in a polymer. Different resonant modes, different damping, etc. Will you hear it? Depends on a WIDE array of things. What purpose is the cap serving? Sometimes that is pretty invisible.
Caps also have different inductive (you can often think of this as the OPPOSITE of capacitance) qualities depending on construction, and really big caps - rated for high voltages, are going to have heartier insulation which can affect the over all small signal transfer efficiency, meaning that a big fat 1kV cap might only be 0.01uf compared to a 50 volt 1uf of similar dimension - but meanwhile impedance has crept up which alters the character of the cap when compared to a 10 volt 0.01uf.
Sometimes this is microscopic, and the big parts are cool enough to overlook any treble bleed or whatever.
Sometimes decades worth of storage has infused carbon comp resistors with enough humidity/degradation to turn them into shot noise/popcorn generators.
Again, can be cool for some things, sucks for others.
No harm in trying them out, but I would advise against paying up for vintage parts as at this point the scarcity index far outweighs any imaginary authenticity they are supposed to endow. At least that's my take.