To be honest, the Fender tone pots that come with the S-1 are better than most of the generic CTS pots that are sold by most outlets.

If you stick with the S-1, then I would keep the pots and switches. The top tone control is a 250K Audio taper pot, and the bridge control is a 250K Audio taper No-load pot. These are pretty nice pots.

If you're going to cut the whole thing out to save (that's what I did for while before putting everything back), then I like the RS 280K Super pot for my volume, and just standard cheapo CTS 250K Audio taper pots for my tone controls. And CRL 5-way switch.

The pots on all the Fenders are actually nice pots, and won't make any difference. Some of the cheap 500K Alpha pots on the Squiers are a different story.

On my other Strats I like the Jensen 0.047uf caps from RS Guitarworks. But since my Dlx is my hard rock axe, where I usually use distortion, it really doesn't matter. I just use a $5 Mallory cap that I had in my parts bin.

I didn't like using a resistor in my treble bleed. It made the volume pot roll linear. I like that hump from 7-10. One thing you can do is solder wires from the lugs and run them out of the pickguard. Then use aligator clips to try different caps and resistor combinations. That's what I did to find what I liked.

Sorry, I actually meant tone caps and not tone pots. I don't want to replace the pots, I just thought maybe I could upgrade the caps as you mentioned that the two caps that are used are not of the best quality. I was thinking about putting in some nice ones for the tone knob and for the S1 speccial capacitor.

I was thinking about the .047uf Jensen as well for the tone pot but since the .022uf is already pretty dark on the lowest setting, I might just swap the current 0.022uf for a better one.

I like the Jensens. I have 4 of them in other Strats (0.047uf).

Come to think of it, I have the 0.033uf Mallory on the S-1 and a RSGuitarCap (0.047uf) on the tone pot.

I've had good luck with the Jensens, Spragues Orange Drops and Sprague Vitimin Q's.

I change stuff on my guitars all the time. I found what I liked by soldering wires to the lugs and cliping different capacitors to the lugs until I found the one I liked. Personally, I think the value of the cap is most important. When I was doing this, I went to Radio Shack and bought a pile of different value caps and just tried different ones until I found the value I was looking for.

One last tip: The S-1 cap is a tiny little cap that's soldered right to the S-1 board. In order to make a larger cap fit, I stripped the insulation from a piece of wire, then slid the insulation over the cap leads, then soldered the cap to the S-1 board. That way I could tuck the larger cap next to the pot.