Stage 7 - swapping original Erie paper-in-oil caps for Jantzen Superior Z cap in HF section.
The previous stages were just the preparatory groundwork for this. This was the Big One, the bit I'd been looking forward to all along. They weren't leaking or bulging, but at 50 years old, replacement seemed prudent.
( Wifey has concerned look )
But two nagging doubts here ; firstly, those original caps were very exotic back then, and I would have to go a long way up the boutique ladder to better them. Copper foil was the obvious choice, but 790 quid made them
out of reach. Not sure if the chosen Superior Z caps would be sufficient.
Secondly, folk revitalizing Celestion 44 and 66's had discovered that replacing their old caps with modern polyprops had disrupted phase angles/slopes/roll offs due to the lower ESR. Compensating resistors after the cap was
a fudge that didn't work. Allegedly. What has this got to do with Gale 401's you ask ? Well, it seems that Ira G 'borrowed' both the tweeter and Celestion's crossover for it for his design. And the midrange driver - despite being a different
unit - shares a very similar circuit too.
In fact, three nagging doubts really...that the HF 2000 tweeter just isn't good enough to warrant any great expense on exotica upstream.
So it was with equal measures of optimism and apprehension that those monstrous red Z caps went in.
To find a silky, round and creamy quality. Making the previous seem raspy and gritty in comparison. Wonderful. But wait a minute - it's also very small sounding, subdued and terribly 'shut in'. Oh dear.
That small sound is a deal breaker for me, and I was on the cusp of taking them out, but there was one unexpected quality that kept me listening for a bit longer. The ability to show real group dynamics - instruments would keep
playing even when something else had the melody line. It was apparent with every type of source material, and because it was such a novel phenomenon ( for me, anyway ) I stuck with it.
And it was a good thing I did, because over the next few weeks the round and creamy nature expanded to fill a huge soundstage with detail,delicacy and 3D layering. I had no idea that those HF 2000's could be this good.
Did it change the character of the Gales ? No. Just made them more revealing and capable of a greater range of expression.
The sales blurb states that no burn-in is required with these caps. Don't you believe it.
Verdict **** value for money 6/10
Forgot to mention that the perceived volume level and brightness was very close to the original - so no thoughts of altering pot levels ( or fixed resistor values ). So presumably the ESR values were similar, and those Erie's were not out of spec after all.