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In Reply to: RE: Tube sound - how much is due to the caps? posted by Bold Eagle on December 13, 2015 at 06:58:28
After a lot of back and forth and a lot of digressions, here is the best answer to my question. This quote is from the last paragraph of the paper on capacitors recommended by Jim McShane (Thanks again, Jim)
After we had gone through all of the above exercises and exorcised our complete system of unnecessary or poor-quality capacitors, the total degree of improvement was greater than any other improvement measure ever employed. With no capacitors (or clean capacitors), you begin to hear the music in a new light, one which is much more like the sound of the real thing. In fact, you will be able to differentiate subtleties you never before even realized existed. Your system simply becomes a new system, in terms of resolution and definition. The "solid-state sound" we've all heard discussed may be largely due to lousy electrolytics—which by and large never got used in the signal path in the tube days.
If you have not read the article, I join Jim in highly recommending it. I'll probably replace the smaller electrolytics with polypropylene film, and only use bypass on the very large ones. (like the 47 uF in the preamp)
Jerry
Follow Ups:
...it should be understood that the article is 35 yo and there have been cap technology improvements and style and fashion changes since that was published as well as other studies with somewhat contradictory findings. The Marsh and Jung article doesn't even acknowledge a current cap darling, the hermetic PIO. Another cap cap type currently in vogue, the silver-mica is found to be substandard by them. The article also equates film-n-foil construction with metalized film and yet today there are many that believe film-n-foil to be far superior. Another oft cited (but old) "cap study" by S. Bench finds the PIO type to be superior to all other types including the polystyrene types that Marsh and Jung find to be superior along with polypropylene and Teflon.
Overall, it seems that one still can't generalize about caps in audio apps except for maybe high value ceramics and tantalums. Caveat emptor for sure.
Tastes will vary, and fads come and go; but there is no question that any of them are preferable to electrolytics. At least one of the posters in this thread preferred polyester. And 35 years old or not, the K factors of the dialectrics aren't going to change. Improved winding techniques might reduce the inductance; but even 35 years ago, the film caps had the resonance frequency up around 400 kHz, far above audibility or the passband of most all amps.
This thread is already too long; and I'm very tired of refuting people's arguments that don't bear on my original question. Marsh and Jung appear to have done that to my satisfaction, so I'm done with this thread.
Jerry
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