Cap Brands/Quality

[AudioEcstasy]

I'm sure this has been exhausted to death, but I've browsed the net and can't quite find a suitable conclusion.

I'm about to put an order in to New Sensor for a run of pedals to fill an order, and I've been thinking about upgrading the caps in my LP for a long time. My question is, regarding stompboxes, is there any real advantage to going with, say... Orange Drop, Mallory, Silver Mica, Xicon Polypropylene, Sprague Atoms, etc. over the standard caps you can get at a decent electronics store (JK Electronics in Westminster, CA for me...)?

Disregarding the type of cap that's needed, if I used these better brands exclusively would it make the circuit sound that much better? My experience would say that, yes, it would b/c they're better products but I wanted to see what everyone here thinks.

If there is a clone thread of this one, a link is great b/c I couldn't find one.

Thanks everyone! 

[R.G.]

I'm sure this has been exhausted to death, but I've browsed the net and can't quite find a suitable conclusion.

You won't find a suitable conclusion. Try them and listen. If you think you hear a difference, kewl, go get them.

The cork-sniffing cadre of the internet audio core has seen to it that there can't be a logical conclusion. Go with what you hear.

I'm about to put an order in to New Sensor for a run of pedals to fill an order, and I've been thinking about upgrading the caps in my LP for a long time. My question is, regarding stompboxes, is there any real advantage to going with, say... Orange Drop, Mallory, Silver Mica, Xicon Polypropylene, Sprague Atoms, etc. over the standard caps you can get at a decent electronics store (JK Electronics in Westminster, CA for me...)?

IMHO - no. You will get large numbers of people testifying that X or Y Megablaster caps made their pedal (and the whole rest of their audio chain right back to the power plant) sound like a guitar deity was playing through their fingers.

Use the appropriate caution when believing in snake oi... er, magic mojo parts.

Disregarding the type of cap that's needed, if I used these better brands exclusively would it make the circuit sound that much better? My experience would say that, yes, it would b/c they're better products but I wanted to see what everyone here thinks.

I don't know what you mean by "better". In fact, "better", without some way to measure it, is meaningless. In fact, in advertising speech, courts have held that "best" means "like all the rest", but that "better" requires data to show how to measure it.

If there is a clone thread of this one, a link is great b/c I couldn't find one.

Not exactly this question, but the essence is the same in several zillion posts here and elsewhere.

[Jazznoise]

The cork-sniffing cadre of the internet audio core has seen to it that there can't be a logical conclusion. Go with what you hear.

That's because cork dielectrics sound better, though I've heard a few complaints they can be abit "winey" 

[R.G.]

The cork-sniffing cadre of the internet audio core has seen to it that there can't be a logical conclusion. Go with what you hear.

That's because cork dielectrics sound better, though I've heard a few complaints they can be abit "winey" 

I forget - how many "h's" in "winey"?

[mremic01]

My experience so far has been that caps can sound a little different overall, but one cap here or there probably won't be noticeable and its difficult to tell whether the change in sound is caused by the type of cap or the tolerance of the cap that replaced it.

All the distortion/overdrive circuits that I've made with an electrolytic in the signal path sounded harsh and awful. One day I noticed that the BSIABII I made from a kit had a 1uf film output cap, while I had breadboarded and perfed a few with electrolytics in that spot. As soon as I switch to film, they sounded much nicer. I attempted to build the Thor twice, and both sounded awful. I tried it with film and it was great. For other kinds of circuits, electrolytics sound fine. The Rebote 2.5 is great with them. Although I think my favourite has been with multilayer ceramics.

I've built a few OCDs, mostly with film caps. When I got a chance to look inside a stock unit, I noticed it was mostly multilayer ceramics, and the stock unit had the exact same values as my builds, but was much smoother than any of them. So I've got some ceramics on order to see if I can hit the stock unit tone spot on.

I don't trust the green mylar caps. Here and there, they don't seem to take away from the tone. But I've done some good sounding builds with them and sound bad ones. Never great ones. In theory, they shouldn't sound any different from those nice red panasonic film caps, or box caps, but Tayda's box caps have given me the most consistently good sounding circuits. Now part of that could be that as I get more experience, the pedals are sounding nicer. But my gut's telling me to avoid the cheap green caps and go for the box films. And sometimes it's hard to not listen with your eyes.

Having said that, I haven't noticed anything amazing with the red panasonics or fancy WIMA caps. Basically, I avoid cheapos, but don't bother with mojo parts because I don't hear any mojo from them.

[amptramp]

If you can replace an electrolytic cap with a film cap, do it - the worst film cap is still better than the best electrolytic and it is much more stable over life - electrolytics tend to lose capacitance as they age.  This includes all types - aluminum, tantalum and niobium.  Ceramics are a different story - they may sound OK playing in your bedroom and sound different (usually worse) on stage because they tend to be microphonic.  If you can replace a ceramic with a film cap, you will get more consistent sound and less harmonic distortion because a ceramic transfers part of the energy and uses part to flex the ceramic.  This latter part disappears from the sound.

Steve Bench has demonstrated capacitor characteristics here:

http://diyaudioprojects.com/mirror/members.aol.com/sbench102/caps.html

This was also archived under greygum when the great AOL meltdown wiped out a lot of sites.  This does not show the amount of distortion added by the various types, but just groups them under "obviously bad" and "probably OK".

[Mark Hammer]

Sensible advice from amptramp, although the question was not about type, but about brand.

For my part, I think there are a number of qualitatively different rationales for picking different brands:

1) Consistency and robustness of product.  If you're a commercial builder, you'd like caps that come in closer to nominal value than to the boundaries of the tolerance as often as possible.  You'd also like something that holds up under duress.  I've had some cap that Ithought were pretty good and the leads came right off when I apploied just a bit too much heat.  In amplifiers, caps have to hold up nicely under high voltage, and often high heat circumstances.  I can see where some brands pose fewer troubles over the long run than others.  Of course, if you're not a manufacturer, all of that matters less. 

2) Audio vs music.  When the goal is reproduction of multi-source spectrally dense signal, like an acoustic orchestra, all of those harmonics have to line up with all those fundamentals flawlessly, or else you'll have a hard time pairing them up.  Remember, you only have two ears, and there is a lot of work involved in putting all that information together to form an "auditory scene" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_scene_analysis ).  I wouldn't doubt that there can be subtle exotic characteristics of caps that vary by brand, which can have an impact on that last teeny little bit of what makes reproduced music sound more "real".  But all of that is entirely separate from a single musician playing a single instrument through an amplifier, often distorted.  The qualities of a cap that can be important in high-end music reproduction can be entirely moot at the level of one guy swatting a guitar.

So, the short answer is that cap brand CAN matter, but for the most part it doesn't matter all that much in our context...unless you're a manufacturer and the issue is reliability.

[AudioEcstasy]

Thanks so much for the responses guys! Really cleared it up for me.

Cheers!

[R.G.]

So, the short answer is that cap brand CAN matter, but for the most part it doesn't matter all that much in our context...unless you're a manufacturer and the issue is reliability.

- or price.   

Finding good stuff a penny cheaper is a noble goal, worshipped by good engineers. The blinding urge to find stuff just a penny cheaper, good or not, is what makes good engineers contemptuous of MBAs.

[amptramp]

The ultimate boutique electrolytic cap for quite some time was the Black Gate made by Rubycon.  But they were last manufactured in 2006, so even the latest stock is about a quarter of the way through its life by now and there is no guarantee when a capacitor was manufactured - you may buy some that are a decade old.  They were often used by technicians restoring or modifying high-end audio devices like amplifiers and tuners.  Since many of these were modern low-impedance solid-state circuits, there was a need for an electrolytic capacitor that was suitable for audio coupling.  If you saw the Steve Bench article I linked earlier there are waveform deviations caused by ESR (equivalent series resistance) and inductance of the capacitors.  There is also the localized destruction of the capacitor near defect sites which accumulate over life and cause capacitance to decrease.  Specifying a higher-than-necessary voltage rating helps reduce this effect, but does not eliminate it entirely.

OS-CON capacitors are a different breed of electrolytic:

http://diyparadise.com/oscon.html

and the factory blurb:

http://www.edc.sanyo.com/english/products/capacitor/oscon/outline.html

There appears to be more than just snake oil about their claims.

[amptramp]

There is a reasonably complete discussion of capacitor dielectrics here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_capacitor

There are a number of different types of film capacitor and some exotic devices are used to overcome specific design issues such as dielectric absorption.

Some things are not complete in the list, such as the niobium oxide capacitors that are relatives of the tantalum electrolytic but are only available up to a 15 volt rating.  I have never seen tantalum electrolytics greater than 75 volts, but some higher values exist that use two tantalum slugs in series in the same package.

[R.G.]

I think I'm getting grumpy about the "which is the best capacitor" question in general.

Mother Nature says that things that are not equivalent down to the quantum level are all different **somehow** if you can measure them finely enough. The problem lies in the fineness of the measurement device. Human hearing is an exceedingly UNreliable and UNrepeatable measuring device, especially since the evaluation stuff that goes on in the brain happily fills in what it thinks it should hear, all before the conscious mind can get hold of the data.

So - are caps different? Sure - every cotton-picking capacitor on the planet, manufactured yet, or not, is different. The question is not whether caps are different. Like bicycles or apples, every one of them is unique. The question is whether (a) you can reliably hear the differences and (b) can you by buying Belchmeister Megacaps ensure that you get the good ones, presuming you can identify "good". And presuming Belchmeister is not just relabeling whatever caps *they* can get cheap with the ever-so-attractive "Belchmeister" logo.

Beginners in general have been bombarded with a variety of corks to sniff by people wanting to sell things to them. So every beginner who has the sense to wonder if it really matters - whatever "it" is for caps, or however many "its" there are - will pop up on the internet asking the same question, because there has been an economically motivated sales campaign to get them (and all of us) to buy only capacitors made from whiffle dust available only in the back yard of the latest huckster.

And it is human nature to believe the person who speaks with the most conviction and volume about what is good and not.

So sure - caps vary. The big question for a brand new pedalmaking boutique ordering parts is to ask themselves "Can *I* hear a difference? Reliably?" and to act accordingly.

[brett]

Hi
"My experience so far has been that caps can sound a little different overall"

Tricky stuff. Some people have previously posted that cheap and nasty caps, including monolythics, sound "gritty" and "rock and roll". Oh my. That kind of tips things upside down, and ruins the thread.
A review of previously threads leads me to conclude that every cap has a 50/50 chance of making an undetectable improvement or an undetectable unimprovement.

As an added complication, I live in Australia, so the caps that make pedals really good in the Northern Hemisphere usually make a pedal sound like crap here. 

No offence to the particular poster. I took it as a representative comment.
cheers

[Kesh]

As an added complication, I live in Australia, so the caps that make pedals really good in the Northern Hemisphere usually make a pedal sound like crap here. 

When touring Australia, most musicians simply place their pedals upside down. It's still pretty easy to turn them on and off with your foot.

[artifus]

i think we should put a cap on this thread.



http://studiozey.com/woodencapacitor/index.html

[rockhorst]

For the OP: just remember that there is NO sense in paying $20 to $50 for a magic mojo tone cap for your guitar, though Gison would
Ike to make you believe different). Save your money and use it to get a couple of different types and values that you can easily test and discard or keep or swap.

I personally kinda like the film greenies in my builds, though they're big, but as you read not every one agrees. The little MKT box films are not as fancy looking but work rather good IMO. I've used some silver micas for small values, just because, but never really tested if it mattered sound wise. I'm an engineer, just not in electronics, so I don't have to minimize cost.

On the issue of cost, I was blind-urge-to-modding a Boss SD-1 and was wondering what type of cap is used in there. They look like a transparent casing with some silvery foil inside. Are those film caps similar to a greenie? Wouldn't seem the cheapest solution (and Boss definitely IS into that )

[R.G.]

... was wondering what type of cap is used in there. They look like a transparent casing with some silvery foil inside. Are those film caps similar to a greenie? Wouldn't seem the cheapest solution (and Boss definitely IS into that )

That's a good description of the typical look of polystyrene caps.