Ceramics and tants... harsh because they're better...

[Phorhas]

I read this article from TI about reducing cross-talk in OAs and the mentioned to stick a high value tantalum cap and a lower value ceramic cap close to the OA power rail and shorting to ground.

Anyways, they mentioned that the tantalums and ceramics handle the high frequencies much better than most, and that's way they'll shunt them better.

So I started thinking, could the "harsher" sound when using these types of capacitor be due to their superior high frequency handling, and film caps sound "warmer" because the do pass highest freq. as good?

Pondering...


Cheers
Dan.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

There was a multi-part study of capacitor-based distortion in Electronics World (UK) last year. The high-dielectric ceramic bypass caps (the 'small for their value' ones) are somewhat non-linear, so are electrolytics.
Whether it matters, depends on where they are & what they are doing.
This doesn't have anythign to do with whetehr they are good for bypasign though, there you just need to have low impedance at the frequency in question.