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RE: "....the ultimate in purity and accuracy." Exactly how did you determine that?

Carbon films should be almost as good as metal films, maybe a tad more noise, but it shouldn't be audible. I never bother with carbon film because good metal films are so cheap. It's so difficult to make a comparison between resistors that I discount almost all reports of audible differences between types.

The metal foil resistors aren't all they're cracked up to be- go read what the Audio Precision people have to say after testing them recently.

Carbon composition is unstable so some might be pretty good, but they can be very noisy and the values drift. They have no place in modern design. Some say they're lower inductance, but if you have any lead length at all, that benefit quickly disappears. Put a standard 1/4 W metal film on a vector impedance analyzer and you'll see it does fine at 50-100 MHz. Metal oxide can give you a very small resistor (that can run burning hot) but their temperature coefficient is lousy. I avoid 'em.

In SMT, thick film resistors are a lot noisier than thin film (metal film).

There are no sonic properties of resistors that aren't apparent from measurements of voltage coefficient, noise measurements and maybe temperature coefficient. It's also highly debatable if magnetic end caps or leads have any audible effect, though material types might give you some small thermocouple effects. Again, the tests to prove it are far too hard for people to set up. You'd have to build up truly identical units to compare and few are willing to go to that trouble, then you still have all the issues of doing an unbiased comparison between two devices.

It turns out that you get a huge bang for your buck with common 1/4 W metal films from KOA or whoever.

(It's OK, I do have several pairs of flameproof underwear at the ready.)


Edits: 09/11/14
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