Vintage Guitars and Electronics

What's the big deal about vintage instruments, amps and effects, and why do they cost so damn much? I can understand it from a pure scarcity perspective. And the law of supply and demand comes into play. But why are these things so sought after? I have a few ideas about the why of this but one thing is for certain: Vintage gear, that has survived to this day, is clearly better than its modern counter parts. I'll spend the rest of this entry speculating on why this is.
1) Attrition.
Not all manufactured objects are created equal. Even the same brand, model and date of manufacture does not guarantee a consistency of quality. In electronics, components manufactured for consumer grade devices have an acceptable range of 10% plus or minus deviation from their designated value. That means a 1000 ohm resistor could actually be 900 ohms and be perfectly acceptable. The gain of a transistor is specified to be 100 in the design but in reality it could vary from 90 to 110. Thats the 10% margin of accuracy required for consumer grade electronics. Suppose you have two or three components in a critical area of the circuit and they are all 10% off in the minus direction. You then have a cumulative deviation of 30% off from the design parameters. This is bound to have an effect on the performance and quality of the device. It can and does happen. There will be some exceptionally bad devices due to this and some exceptionally good ones. The bad ones will eventually get tossed and the good ones will increase in value overtime until they are considered vintage.
      Guitars: I've talked to many custom guitar builders and luthiers. One topic that usually comes up is the random luck of the draw regarding how well a particular guitar comes out compared to other guitars with the exact same design, and made from the same batch of raw materials, by the same person. You could compare this to human genetic heredity, where the offspring from a certain couple have the exact same gene pool to draw from (mom and dad). How those genes assemble themselves turns out to be random except for the rare case of identical twins. The quality of these offspring is a subjective matter but not dissimilar to how one might judge a pair of the same model guitars from the same manufacturer. One is bound to be different, if not better than the other. This leads back to the vintage is better argument in that over time, the inferior guitar that came out of the Fender plant on the same day as the superior guitar is more likely to be modified, cannibalized, refinished or even destroyed than it's superior playing and sounding counterpart.
      From this perspective it is purely the concept of attrition that causes vintage gear to be of better quality than its modern day counterparts. Only the better quality instruments, determined largely by random luck of the draw when manufactured, survive through time, to be judged by us today.
2) The positive effects of aging.
Guitars are made of wood. Wood is a fibrous material with a cellular structure that contains moisture. Moisture in wood is also known as sap. Over time, sap crystallizes and becomes brittle. Amber is an example of ancient crystallized wood sap. It seems obvious that older hardened sap would be more resonant and therefore more musical than modern mushy sap. I don't really have any scientific references to back this up. After all this is just me speculating. Seems like an obvious conclusion though. Please provide your own grain of salt.
      Vintage guitar finishes are usually made from nitro-cellulose lacquer. This type of finish continues to cure and harden over its lifetime. The idea being that a harder finish is more resonant than a softer/ modern poly finish. I've also heard it said that a lacquer finish breaths and allows the wood underneath to continue to lose moisture (and therefore allow the sap to harden?) I'm not sure how much that plays a part but thought it worth mentioning. If true that would make for a lighter guitar eventually as water is heavy. Lighter guitars seem to be more desirable than heavy guitars currently.
      What about vintage electronics? What could be positive about the aging of electronics? I'm glad you asked. A couple of months ago I was having a conversation with Bill Krinard of Two-Rock Amplifiers at the Zone Music musicians swap meet (I'm still kicking myself for not buying that Supro Dual tone guitar off of him) and he imparted some very interesting speculation regarding vintage electronics. Actually Bill firmly believes this, and who am I to argue with one of the best amp builders around. Bill says its the wire in vintage electronics that provides the magic we call tone. Wire is in pickups, transformers, speakers, all manner of other components not to mention all the point to point connections associated with vintage gear. In essence it completely permeates every aspect of this music generating equipment. So, if what Bill says is true, than it is having a massive influence indeed. So here's the gist of it. Apparently when wire is manufactured it is stretched and heated and  a crystalline structure is imparted to it. This crystalline structure is not good for tone. But it is temporary and over time this crystalline structure relaxes and allows current to flow more freely? I put that as a question because I'm not exactly sure how this works. Suffice it to say, Bill thinks that because vintage wire has lost its crystalline structure over time, it sounds better. I thought about trying to research this metallurgically, but for now I will leave that to others. It's a little ironic that this seems to be exactly opposite of my speculation above about how its the crystallization of wood sap that leads to superior tone of vintage guitars.
Vibration / vibe: Physical / metaphysical. Many people feel that inanimate objects (guitars) can absorb and or somehow contain the vibe/mojo/juju/spirit of their longtime human players. Others feel that the constant playing and physical vibration of the wood reinforces itself and makes a guitar more better somehow. I think there may be something to both of these arguments. In the case of vibe or mojo inhabiting an instrument, it may provide a very real psychological boost having noteworthy provenance of a particular instrument. It certainly wouldn't hurt the resale value to have been owned and played by someone famous. I suppose it could also be true that constant playing and vibrating of a guitar over time could have a cumulative and positive effect on the instrument above and beyond the physical effects of aging described above. Kind of a "broken in" effect seems to occur and it may be that constant playing accelerates and or modifies the way sap crystallizes or how much moisture escapes from the wood.
      It is pretty much undeniable that a much played instrument will 99% of the time sound better than a brand new one of the same ilk. Weather that is due to attrition, the positive effects of aging or acquired mojo, I'll leave that up to the reader to cogitate.
     There are so many things I've left out here because it's too broad of a subject to discuss exhaustively in just these few paragraphs. If you'd like to continue the discussion feel free to chime in with your own version of how this stuff works.
Thanks fore reading,
Dave at DCXSound