Capacitor Brands and Sonic Qualities

[Dylfish]

Hey Guys,

I've been looking at stokcing up my parts and i've come across Resistor (1% metal film) and all types of caps on EBay.

When it comes to capacitors do brands matter and make a huge difference or will any within a certain tollerance do? What sonic change do capacitors have brand to brand?

Thanks

[anchovie]

When it comes to capacitors do brands matter and make a huge difference

In a lot of cases, it depends how much you want to believe that they do! 

[digi2t]

When it comes to capacitors do brands matter and make a huge difference

In a lot of cases, it depends how much you want to believe that they do! 

+1. Personally, I tend to design around metal film caps. The 50 or 63 volt versions have the smallest footprint of their type, but not as small as ceramics. I use ceramics on occasion, for small values (pF range), or when I'm really pressed for space. Soundwise, I don't find any difference. It's purely an esthetic thing for me.

[Dylfish]

thanks guys,

I've seen on smallbear and a few other places brands such as panasonic floating around. I take it its more a "Brand" think like having Reebok Pump shoes in the early 90's?

[pappasmurfsharem]

thanks guys,

I've seen on smallbear and a few other places brands such as panasonic floating around. I take it its more a "Brand" think like having Reebok Pump shoes in the early 90's?

Te ones I see a lot are the Panasonic red bean looking caps. And for some reason I think they look schnazzier. But I wouldn't go out of my way for them. They are pricey too, I just use the box caps from tayda and everything seems to sound great to me. Even if there was an audible difference a hair movement of the knobs would/could negate anything you thought you heard.

[MaxPower]

For what it's worth, I read an article on capacitors in an electronics magazine a few years ago. The author claims to have been in the business of designing caps. Anyway, he tried to come up with an objective way of measuring various characteristics. His findings were that there were differences in capacitors that came from the same manufacturer. There were even differences within the same production run.

How significant the differences, or which characteristics, I don't recall.

[merlinb]

When it comes to capacitors do brands matter and make a huge difference or will any within a certain tollerance do? What sonic change do capacitors have brand to brand?

No, the brand doesn't matter (unless you manage to find some dodgy 'brand' that actually makes defective capacitors.) The general rules of capacitors are these:

Cheap ceramics produce the most distortion and variation with, temperature, phases of the moon etc.
Tantalum capactors produce a lot of distortion, similar to cheap ceramics.
Aluminium electrolytics produce less distortion. It varies with DC bias too.
Non-polar electrolytics produce less still.
Polyester capacitors produce some (but not much) distortion.
Other plastic capacitors are basically distortionless.
NP0/C0G ceramics are basically distortionless.

Distortion is related to how much signal voltage appears across the capacitor. Smaller signal = less distortion.
Distortion is related to the dielectric thickness (i.e. voltage rating) of the cap. Higher voltage ratings = less distortion. A 63V-rated polyester cap may produce measurable distortion, whereas a 250V polyester may not, at least not at the sort of voltages you'll be dealing with.

Does any of this distortion actually matter? It does to hi-fi purists, but to guitarists, who knows. Maybe it's irrelevent, maybe it's something you want to chase and manipulate....

[scintillation]

Not forgetting that the impedance of different "composition" of capacitors changes with frequency.

I think I'd worry about pickups, my playing technique etc. before I lost sleep over capacitors.

It would be interesting to see something done looking at a spectrogram of the differences between capacitors. However, to make it a fair test you'd need to vary the type of effect, notes played etc. So to do something "scientifically sound" you would waste a lot of time to probably find out that the difference was not that significant.

[Gus]

why the new thread? http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=106733.0