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Capacitor break-in

Electrolytic capacitors form to their applied voltage over time. That's well established and not the subject here.

My question concerns break-in of other types of capacitors.

Recently we recapped a pair of Snell type A speakers. Peter Snell tuned the crossover by ear, so the capacitor banks in the two speakers were different. We used film capacitors, matching the original measured (not listed) values to better than 0.1%. At first the speakers sounded worse than before. That surprised the heck out of me. You could have never told me that a film capacitor would sound worse than an electrolytic in any circumstance, but it did--at first.

After a surprisingly long and gradual break-in period (many tens or hundreds of hours) the speakers approached and surpassed their original sound quality.

So, with that long introduction, here's the question: What is the physics behind capacitor break-in? What is going on inside the capacitor? What exactly changes? If you know of any papers or websites that describe the physical process please share.

thanks,

Lee of Omaha

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Topic - Capacitor break-in - Lee of Omaha 09:21:46 05/31/21 (193)
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