[Lucien Nunes]

I think the fuzz pedal is one of those peculiar situations where the reason a replica-builder chooses a component is different to the reason the original manufacturer chose it. In the days of the originals they would use any parts that could be got conveniently and cheaply, because the aim was to produce a particular effect and they knew that within reason, any one of a number of alternatives would give that effect. Now, when building a replica, replicating the original hardware is as important to people as replicating the effect, so even if the original choice was a poor one made on cost grounds, they want to make the same poor choice again.

In some cases this is compounded by a lack of knowledge of the effects of component choice on circuit performance, that leads to the well known tendency to ascribe particular characteristics to parts that they don't actually have - e.g. a 'mellow' capacitor or a 'bright' resistor. Noise is a significant nuisance in music amplification and if people would select components more on their contribution of noise, they would probably get a better subjective result as it is rare that one actually wants the noise as part of the recreated sound. Non-linearities obviously yes, because you want to re-create the original distortion spectrum, but hum and noise are invariably bad outside of musique concrète and there's usually too much noise.