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Re: solens vs electrolytics

Posted by Mark Kaepplein on July 31, 2000 at 13:06:15:
Compared to a generic power supply electrolytic capacitor, a Solen is superior in every way except having much greater cost and physical size. The impedence is lower, and the Dissipation Factor is much lower. The thing about impedence is that at low frequencies, more capacitance will mean lower impedence for unregulated supplies. So, if its an amp and you don't have enough capacitance, bass will suffer. One way around this is to use choke filtered supplies where energy is also stored in the choke.
Compared to a FA electrolytic, a big Solen will have higher impedence above 100khz. I would rather use a higher quality/lower impedence film cap of 1-10 uf close to the load as a bypass of a good electrolytic cap supply. Cost is kept reasonable, as are space requirements. I have not experimented with all film supplies and hope someone else could comment on it.
Solen caps are well suited for some applications like speaker crossovers and cost-effective coupling caps. For someone wanting no electrolytics in a supply, they are cost effective also. I'm not sure a well bypassed electrolytic power supply couldn't do just as good.