Steve Deckert
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The Mundorf Supreme caps have been around a long time. I've always liked them. When the original caps I used in the Zen Triode amplifiers became obsolete due to some Green energy regulation, and I could no longer get our WIMA FKP-1's made in the original blue, I started thinking it was probably a good time to think about putting something in the amps that was more expensive. Back then our FKP-1's were blue, and WIMA also made other series that were red and the red ones were terrible for audio application. Now they want to make the good sounding ones red in color - it was too much.
As a replacement for both I was contemplating Rel, MIT, and Mundorf. Before I had really made any decisions one way or the other, I discovered the Jupiter Beeswax capacitor and because they were made here in the USA and had that organic thing going on, like our Silver Reference Interconnects, I decided to go with them and have used them all these many years since.
Our inventory of the Jupiter beeswax caps is expiring and unfortunately the caps being manufactured at present no longer pass our quality standards. I'm sure it's probably temporary, perhaps due to the Covid crisis. This of course made me wish I had gone with the Mundorf, because film and or foil caps that are properly made never fail. They last forever. It's caps that use wax or oils as part of the dielectric that eventually fail, or fall out of spec.
So as many of you know I made an announcement that we were switching over to Mundorf, a cap who's sound I was well familiar with. After purchasing all of the US stock I made the big announcement.
When making that announcement and promising that all 340 (at the time) people on our build sheet would get the Mundorf caps, I had completely forgotten that we already had somewhere around 50 components already built and waiting for QC each built with beeswax caps! But since I said what I said -- we removed the beeswax caps from all of those units and replaced them with Mundorfs. An very expensive mistake, nothing more. The reason I'm telling you this is because I don't feel that the sound of the Mundorf is necessarily better than the beeswax so there is no reason for people with beeswax caps to have them removed. And the reason I removed them from 50 components wasn't because the Mundorf were superior, it was because of how I worded my announcement. And while I expect many of the beeswax to possibly fail 20 years down the road, our lifetime warranty will cover any replacements.
On a funny side note, we now have an understanding that announcements will be reviewed by three people instead of one prior to being emailed to our customers.
This story gets even better, but I'll save part 2 for my next post.
Steve
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