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Capacitors don't matter ...

Posted by Dave I on July 25, 2000 at 19:03:33

In Reply to: Re: What's next? posted by BFitz on July 25, 2000 at 18:17:21:

The HF are a little better but I was never too impressed with anything Panasonic offered although most of the testing I performed was a few years ago.

By far the best easily available and inexpensive electrolytics I tested and subsequently used a lot of were the old Sprague 672 and 673 series developed originally for switchmode power supplies. They have thick aluminum cases, thick aluminum plates, internal damping material, copper leads and an epoxy end seal - all things that the more modern miniature caps lack. They are MUCH bigger than those modern caps though. Sprague has gone through a lot of changes since then and I haven't ordered any for a few years as I don't use them anymore but they might still be available.

I was fairly impressed with some of the audio grade caps in the Nichicon line at the time and obtained many, many samples for testing. Their top of the line version was very good sounding but a little soft I believe. I listened to literally hundreds of different brand and value aluminum electrolytics after inadvertently "discovering" how bad the HFQs were. At the time I didn't believe that electrolytics made much difference, instead thinking they were all equally bad so used the commonly recommended HFQ almost exclusively. I had prototyped an amp and it was all set to get boards made and I needed to finalize the transformer winding spec. At that time I realized that I would have to increase the gain stage supply voltage a few volts to meet my power spec under all line conditions and it would be close to or above the 63V cap value I was using at the time. I decided to go with 100V caps but to fit in the same footprint, the value would be somewhat smaller so I rigged up the PC board with pins to allow me to easily swap in and out different value caps to see how much it would affect the sound. I substituted some older caps with a lower capacitance value that I had on hand to simulate what the 100V caps would be and listened expecting the sound to be (hopefully) as good or maybe a little worse. But I was astounded to find they sounded much better than the HFQs. So much smoother. Back and forth I tested and always the same conclusion. I had others listen and even my girlfriend could easily tell. This led to much further investigation and buying of many surplus caps to test and cut open and examine and on and on ...

The moral of the story is they all sound awful compared to even bad film capacitors but the miniaturized ones even sound worse. Get the biggest, heaviest caps you can find and conduct your own test with pins installed in the board so you can make quick changes. You may be surprised how far we have "advanced" in the last 25 years! I have a bunch of 1000uF/15VDC Sprague 672D capacitors if someone else would like to do some testing and report their results. I have some wrapped in lead also that are in a different league. If someone thinks they have the capability to conduct an impartial test maybe we could set something up. What about you Bob? Or I could mail a set to a couple people and we could get some feedback. Limited time offer...:-)

Now days I try to design audio gear without electrolytics, at least not anywhere near the analog sections so I haven't been doing any tests on them for a few years. I have been using epoxy molded tantalums in the digital sections.

Dave

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