Ceriatone Rocket

[Gargoyle]

Hey guys, gonna get Nik to partially assemble a Rocket for me as I am still not up to speed yet on my assembly skills.
I have an Express from Nik with Mallory caps (from Allyn) and Heyboers that I am very happy with.
The Heyboer trannies and Choke are on there way (Thanks RJ) already, but I need some advice on the caps.
Nik has given me some options either the standard Sprague 6ps, Mallory 150's or Sozo.
I have read through the BOM on the site and it mentions Mallory.
Guys, which of these would be most suitable?
Thanks for the feedback.
Cheers
Mick

[paulster]

The correct caps in a Rocket are actually Panasonic, which should be mentioned in the BOM.

The 6PS will probably work well, but if I couldn't get the proper Panasonics I'd probably go for the Sozos for this particular build since they work really, really well in Vox builds.

If you go for Sozos then make sure you break them in well before you start critiquing the amp as they are harsh to begin with. This is why I always pull the power tubes, put in some startup preamp tubes and then blast the front end of the amp with test tone sweeps for a couple of days before playing a new build.

[Gargoyle]

Paulster, thanks for the advice mate....
Mick

[KellyBass]

+1 on paulster's comment regarding the sozos. They sound great in my rocket now, but not so good right out of the box. Very noticeable difference!...

[RJ Guitars]

Well you got my curiosity up... I ordered up a few and I'll have to try them in the next Rocket iteration I build.

I've been using the Mallory 150 (or whatever the equivalent is these days) in my little dwarf tube Rocket kits. I chose them because I wanted to offer a kit that had parts that any of us could buy from Mouser or Allied. I was really skeptical of them but figured I needed to listen to them before I wrote them off. A lot of folks really like these things and they are cheap and don't take up much real estate.

It may not be fair to compare tone in a dwarf tube amp with it's big brother but the results sounded good enough to move me from my preference of using Orange drops in everything... I still like orange drops I just don't have to use them exclusively any more.

By the way I don't hear much difference between the CDE-Mallory Orange drops and the Spagues. After reading some old threads on them it seems that they might just be made in the same factory...

rj

[KellyBass]

RJ, The sozo's really do break in nice, but I've mainly got you and ryberton to thank for helping me get my rocket sorted out and sounding so good. I ended up re-doing the whole board and miraculously the amp straightened out. I'm still not sure what exactly was going on as I've put the rocket aside for a couple of days...

But I can tell you that some of the tweaks we were playing with really opened the amp up a lot. The clean tones are amazing! Thanks again!