Where I come from some people actually consider the MKS4 from Wima to be quite alright given the price. Where I am now (Switzerland) there is guy that sells something called Kristal Cap which I found a price for of USD 450 for one 10uF cap. The price is no more on his web page but is stated as NC (probably means something like No Credit cards or Nutty Consultant).
http://www.audio-consulting.ch/prices.htm
That is to much for me.
/UrSv
http://www.audio-consulting.ch/prices.htm
That is to much for me.
/UrSv
Listening to caps
Bernhard,
Don't stop listening! That is to best way to pick a cap. I just thought some of the parameters that make caps different might be of interest. I encourage all to listen to different caps. I have even heard some pretty good polyester caps. Caps will definitely sound better with a DC bias on them. Use two caps in series with a 10 meg resistor to a voltage (experiment with DC value) and you will hear some improvements. The electrostatic forces make the cap more rigid and the polarization of the dielectric seems to help. This is most noticable on metalized caps in my experience. Dampimg material on the can of aluminum electrolytics is also audible. I believe MJ Stereo Technic did a survey where the listened to caps under signal load with a microphone. I seem to recall HiFi News doing something simular with an accelerometer.
Outlandish and proud of it,
H.H.
Bernhard,
Don't stop listening! That is to best way to pick a cap. I just thought some of the parameters that make caps different might be of interest. I encourage all to listen to different caps. I have even heard some pretty good polyester caps. Caps will definitely sound better with a DC bias on them. Use two caps in series with a 10 meg resistor to a voltage (experiment with DC value) and you will hear some improvements. The electrostatic forces make the cap more rigid and the polarization of the dielectric seems to help. This is most noticable on metalized caps in my experience. Dampimg material on the can of aluminum electrolytics is also audible. I believe MJ Stereo Technic did a survey where the listened to caps under signal load with a microphone. I seem to recall HiFi News doing something simular with an accelerometer.
Outlandish and proud of it,
H.H.
I think using Wima caps in a DIY sense are pretty average caps for as PP types go. But using Wina caps in a design, manufacturing, and as a cost effectiveness sense, I think the Wima caps are the "Work Horse of the High End Audio Industry".
I like the Wima caps. And I know a lot of audio people who use them mainly as a cost/sound compromise. Designer like Mr. Curcio and Mr. Borbely use Wima caps alot and I have built their designs too. Of course I have bypass Wima caps with higher quailty types and it always seems that the component is much better. But does live music really sounds that good?
I like the Wima caps. And I know a lot of audio people who use them mainly as a cost/sound compromise. Designer like Mr. Curcio and Mr. Borbely use Wima caps alot and I have built their designs too. Of course I have bypass Wima caps with higher quailty types and it always seems that the component is much better. But does live music really sounds that good?
Hello all,
reading what i wrote yesterday shows me i was not alert and thinking (in fact terrible headache) and i apologize in advance for any troubles/mudslinging arising from this careless statement. Nevertheless i stand by it. I did not check whether Allen still has them in his program or if he ever had. Sloppy me. But he advertised for it, for this i have printed evidence.
Eric,
sorry for slipping the ESR question, i finally have to admit i do not know the acronym, please, what is ESR? (www.acronymfinder.com gave a lot of hits, none of them making sense )
Werner,
i do not stock MKVs, too expensive, i buy as much as i need.
Never planned to sell them up to today, but this can change. I would have to put a factor on it for my expenses unless quantities are so big i can act as a seller myself and get them from the dirstributor.
Of course, i could send you some, email me privately for details.
UrSv,
i only heard rumours about the Kristall caps, good ones. My buddy Thomas Mayer (Vinylsavor) uses this manufacturer's extraordinarily good 600Ohm dual volume control, TMK based on multitapped transformers. From this i would guess this guy sells no junk but what he sells he does at rocket science prices. Too expensive for me to try them out.
What i also did not try out are the famed Audionote silver/paper-in-oil (price!!!!), but what i could get my hands on were Audionote alu and copper / paper-in-oil. And a Ennemoser C37-impreganted version of the alu / paper-in-oil. These caps sound pleasant for sure, no nastiness at all, but they lack in downward dynamic range i.e. the blackness of the background and µdynamics leaves a lot room for wishes, wishes satisfied by the MKV and MKY.
The Audionotes were close with each other, the copper being nicer than the alu and the C37 being nicer than the standard alu. They are in the same league as the SCR/Audyn KP-Sn tinfoil; i would prefer the tinfoil but a professional speaker guy disagrees with me, preferring the Audionote copper. It depends a bit on the application. The Audyn certainly are cheaper.
Harry,
fully agreed with your findings. Me 2 prefers (heavy) bias on caps.
But my listening comparison was done under worst-case conditions, the caps acting as coupling caps with not more than 100mV across them. So the differences were quite big to my ears. I would expect them to be much smaller with 200V across the cap.
To suit the need of cap biasing, i moved the speaker XO into the tube amp, side-effect: i got rid of unneccesary amp stages. BTW, the XO caps are the only caps left in my preamp-poweramp structure (i report about results when i have them).
I have ceased being a cap person, the more i try transformers, the more i like them. Oops, forgot to mention for lurkers, i am a tube nuts. Albeit not afraid to use "sand" in the amp where it works better than a tube. CCS or plate load for instance.
But guess what caps the PS uses! big MKVs. The shunt reg p2p-wired on the MKV's ceramic terminals
I measured a big MKV B25838, 33 µF/560V=, and it had loss values most so-called coupling caps in high end audio only could dream of. Admitted, not as good as the small MKVs. My buddy Peter Hartmann used to use MKVs in his SE 845 amp and he measured de-rating of those 33µF: they started to surrender at about 1600V !!!
You bet i use them in the power amp where i can supply enough space for them. The preamp has to get along with 10µF-MKVs and a shunt reg per stage.
However the caps are in fact not in the signal path as both preamp and power amp are fully differntial.
reading what i wrote yesterday shows me i was not alert and thinking (in fact terrible headache) and i apologize in advance for any troubles/mudslinging arising from this careless statement. Nevertheless i stand by it. I did not check whether Allen still has them in his program or if he ever had. Sloppy me. But he advertised for it, for this i have printed evidence.
Eric,
sorry for slipping the ESR question, i finally have to admit i do not know the acronym, please, what is ESR? (www.acronymfinder.com gave a lot of hits, none of them making sense
)Werner,
i do not stock MKVs, too expensive, i buy as much as i need.
Never planned to sell them up to today, but this can change. I would have to put a factor on it for my expenses unless quantities are so big i can act as a seller myself and get them from the dirstributor.
Of course, i could send you some, email me privately for details.
UrSv,
i only heard rumours about the Kristall caps, good ones. My buddy Thomas Mayer (Vinylsavor) uses this manufacturer's extraordinarily good 600Ohm dual volume control, TMK based on multitapped transformers. From this i would guess this guy sells no junk but what he sells he does at rocket science prices. Too expensive for me to try them out.
What i also did not try out are the famed Audionote silver/paper-in-oil (price!!!!), but what i could get my hands on were Audionote alu and copper / paper-in-oil. And a Ennemoser C37-impreganted version of the alu / paper-in-oil. These caps sound pleasant for sure, no nastiness at all, but they lack in downward dynamic range i.e. the blackness of the background and µdynamics leaves a lot room for wishes, wishes satisfied by the MKV and MKY.
The Audionotes were close with each other, the copper being nicer than the alu and the C37 being nicer than the standard alu. They are in the same league as the SCR/Audyn KP-Sn tinfoil; i would prefer the tinfoil but a professional speaker guy disagrees with me, preferring the Audionote copper. It depends a bit on the application. The Audyn certainly are cheaper.
Harry,
fully agreed with your findings. Me 2 prefers (heavy) bias on caps.
But my listening comparison was done under worst-case conditions, the caps acting as coupling caps with not more than 100mV across them. So the differences were quite big to my ears. I would expect them to be much smaller with 200V across the cap.
To suit the need of cap biasing, i moved the speaker XO into the tube amp, side-effect: i got rid of unneccesary amp stages. BTW, the XO caps are the only caps left in my preamp-poweramp structure (i report about results when i have them).
I have ceased being a cap person, the more i try transformers, the more i like them. Oops, forgot to mention for lurkers, i am a tube nuts. Albeit not afraid to use "sand" in the amp where it works better than a tube. CCS or plate load for instance.
But guess what caps the PS uses! big MKVs. The shunt reg p2p-wired on the MKV's ceramic terminals
I measured a big MKV B25838, 33 µF/560V=, and it had loss values most so-called coupling caps in high end audio only could dream of. Admitted, not as good as the small MKVs. My buddy Peter Hartmann used to use MKVs in his SE 845 amp and he measured de-rating of those 33µF: they started to surrender at about 1600V !!!
You bet i use them in the power amp where i can supply enough space for them. The preamp has to get along with 10µF-MKVs and a shunt reg per stage.
However the caps are in fact not in the signal path as both preamp and power amp are fully differntial.
TLA
Ahhhh...... another TLA ( three letter acronym) ESR is Equivalent Series Resistance and arises from foil or metalization resistance as well as termination and lead resistance. It is usally on the order of a few milliohms. Several electrolytic capacitor manufactures and adding carbon or other conduction materials to the electrolyte to achieve lower ESR. The ones most familiar to us audio nerds are Rubycon Black Gate, Sanyo Oscon, and some of the RIFA series. These are all good sounding caps and some of the Black Gates sound better than many polypropylene caps. Thus endeth the lesson.
Ahhhh...... another TLA ( three letter acronym) ESR is Equivalent Series Resistance and arises from foil or metalization resistance as well as termination and lead resistance. It is usally on the order of a few milliohms. Several electrolytic capacitor manufactures and adding carbon or other conduction materials to the electrolyte to achieve lower ESR. The ones most familiar to us audio nerds are Rubycon Black Gate, Sanyo Oscon, and some of the RIFA series. These are all good sounding caps and some of the Black Gates sound better than many polypropylene caps. Thus endeth the lesson.
Eric, now i know of ESR and can answer, atleast try
.The Schooping process as other contacting methods generates a huge number of paralleled contact resistances. Statically they together yield a very low ESR in the milliOhm range, that's true. But dynamically any of those contacts still may behave like a rat in a bucket and fail in doing us the favour to expose stochastic resistance changes. Let's keep in mind, music is a dynamic thing.
This is only a wild guess derived form listening experineces with different sorts of switches and connectors. Nearly all of them deterioated the music dynamically, compared to a solder joint shorting the contact.
The only connector not reducing speech understandability considerably was the Lemo/Redel plug, any other RCA plug, rotary switch, toggle switch, relay contact did so more or less.
Try it out: have your favorite switch carry the signal and have two short wires soldered to the switch's lugs. Then A/B/A listen with switch closed and switch open/wires soldered together. Take some speech-understandability-critical material e.g. Guns'n'Roses and try to understand what text Axel Rose is screaming. Or take Maria Callas when singing at her physical limits and try to understand the words she is singing/screaming. Better have a libretto, it's mostly Italian
You'll curse! About your switch.
So i presume this lead 2 element contact within caps is a similar thing, happening dynamically and unmeasurable statically. But what i can tell is that a mechanically unreliable inner contact sounds like crap and a contact hard to separate sounds very good. Nothing however beats a sheetmetal riveted to the silver layer of my 200pF single plate micas
Not my beloved WIMAs!
I've been following this thread with some interest. Because I aquired some red WIMA MKP caps a few years ago, and they have propogated themselves into most of my stuff. I'm getting some new Crucio engineering driver boards for my MKIIIs and want to avoid making a "mistake" in my choice of coupling cap.
My story begins 35 years ago, when as a child in the big dept store in Paramus, NJ I noticed how the Grundig radios sounded so different from all the other radios in the store. Besides the fact that I loved the tuning indicatore, this memory has stuck with me.
(Another memory is that the sound of the Bendix saphire II in my dad's Volkswagon was...different for some reason)
20 years after that, I bought some dead solid state Grundig at a flea market. It was a kinda cool unit, with its "anti-D'Appolito" speakers (TMT) with the rope-lay wires - and filled with WIMA caps. I remember thinking "THAT must be the reason why I've always noticed these German radios sound different; it's the caps they use!"
Now I read that the guy from Germany (who outght to know...) finds these particular caps lacking, but this other cap type is better. OK. Can they be had in the states? I got my WIMAs from a power supply design project, where they were used as HV decoupling caps; that the engineer said were there to put out a lot of current for the switching converter.
I'd like to get 4 of the MKV or MKY at 0.5uf 450V for my Dynaco
driver boards. And then, for all the other places I've put them.
What's a reasonable price to pay for these units, as I spec'd above?
Will I be able to notice anything, considering that these will have a greater DC bias than p-p AC signal, in the intended app - versus the MKP WIMAs I'd otherwise use?
I realize the asymptonic relationship between "cost" (money, effort, etc) and "audio perfection". As such, I recognize that going from, say an aluminum electrolytic or ceramic disc to a WIMA mkp may be a lot bigger jump in the right direction than going from a WIMA MKP to a Siemens MKV.
Everyone has their own personal cutoff point along the line of expense and effort, to reach the unreachable star so to speak.
Maybe if the answer comes back $100 US a pop, for that next smidge closer, I may decline.
However I want to make an informed decision, before I start soldering components in place!
I've been following this thread with some interest. Because I aquired some red WIMA MKP caps a few years ago, and they have propogated themselves into most of my stuff. I'm getting some new Crucio engineering driver boards for my MKIIIs and want to avoid making a "mistake" in my choice of coupling cap.
My story begins 35 years ago, when as a child in the big dept store in Paramus, NJ I noticed how the Grundig radios sounded so different from all the other radios in the store. Besides the fact that I loved the tuning indicatore, this memory has stuck with me.
(Another memory is that the sound of the Bendix saphire II in my dad's Volkswagon was...different for some reason)
20 years after that, I bought some dead solid state Grundig at a flea market. It was a kinda cool unit, with its "anti-D'Appolito" speakers (TMT) with the rope-lay wires - and filled with WIMA caps. I remember thinking "THAT must be the reason why I've always noticed these German radios sound different; it's the caps they use!"
Now I read that the guy from Germany (who outght to know...) finds these particular caps lacking, but this other cap type is better. OK. Can they be had in the states? I got my WIMAs from a power supply design project, where they were used as HV decoupling caps; that the engineer said were there to put out a lot of current for the switching converter.
I'd like to get 4 of the MKV or MKY at 0.5uf 450V for my Dynaco
driver boards. And then, for all the other places I've put them.
What's a reasonable price to pay for these units, as I spec'd above?
Will I be able to notice anything, considering that these will have a greater DC bias than p-p AC signal, in the intended app - versus the MKP WIMAs I'd otherwise use?
I realize the asymptonic relationship between "cost" (money, effort, etc) and "audio perfection". As such, I recognize that going from, say an aluminum electrolytic or ceramic disc to a WIMA mkp may be a lot bigger jump in the right direction than going from a WIMA MKP to a Siemens MKV.
Everyone has their own personal cutoff point along the line of expense and effort, to reach the unreachable star so to speak.
Maybe if the answer comes back $100 US a pop, for that next smidge closer, I may decline.
However I want to make an informed decision, before I start soldering components in place!
I've been a satisfied WIMA PP cap user, though will admit that the ones I've used came at no cost to me (infinite performance/cost ratio-- can't beat that!). I mainly have used them in power supply bypass appplications. I am not at the point where I have the time to anal-ize various flavors of PP caps. I've heard good things about Siemens as well, though haven't tried them.
A good friend from college who designs computer controls for a large construction/farm equipment maker found that WIMA film caps were the only ones to survive their incredibly tough environmental qualifications, so he uses them as bypass caps in digital and analog circuits. Nothing else survives. Obviously nothing to do with audio performance but an interesting factoid.
A good friend from college who designs computer controls for a large construction/farm equipment maker found that WIMA film caps were the only ones to survive their incredibly tough environmental qualifications, so he uses them as bypass caps in digital and analog circuits. Nothing else survives. Obviously nothing to do with audio performance but an interesting factoid.
Free Caps
Ah free caps........ As free caps the Wimas are not bad. I might even buy them surplus if they were cheap enough. I promise to use some in a current project to calm the storm that I have created. The last free caps I got were Rel-Cap, Wonder-Cap, and Sidereals. I also traded some ICs for some boards with some Vishay, Rifa, ERO, Wima, Caddock, Toshiba, and Hitachi parts. It pays to pick your friends carefully! And both these guys know better than to give away good stuff like that. I scored some good IXYS Fets and OsCon cap as samples. That and the Rifa caps at the surplus store leads me to think it has been lucky last year for audio parts.
H.H.
Ah free caps........ As free caps the Wimas are not bad. I might even buy them surplus if they were cheap enough. I promise to use some in a current project to calm the storm that I have created. The last free caps I got were Rel-Cap, Wonder-Cap, and Sidereals. I also traded some ICs for some boards with some Vishay, Rifa, ERO, Wima, Caddock, Toshiba, and Hitachi parts. It pays to pick your friends carefully! And both these guys know better than to give away good stuff like that. I scored some good IXYS Fets and OsCon cap as samples. That and the Rifa caps at the surplus store leads me to think it has been lucky last year for audio parts.
H.H.
Free the Caps, to hell with the whales!
Hey..... you lose them and I'll use them. Don't forget the Corning 1% resistors which you also gave away. Pssssst.... I think I found a deal on some Vishay and Caddock resistors surplus but don't tell the others or we will create a panic! Whoops.....
H.H.
Hey..... you lose them and I'll use them. Don't forget the Corning 1% resistors which you also gave away. Pssssst.... I think I found a deal on some Vishay and Caddock resistors surplus but don't tell the others or we will create a panic! Whoops.....
H.H.
dice:
This casts a dubious light on all input selectors and switched attenuators. How do you select your attenuation without heating up the soldering iron? Use PGA2310s? Nice, but probably not the best way....
Another question: will Bürklin ship to private persons, esp. if they can add a technical title to their name? I can go through a friend who has a company, but it is so much easier without...
Eric
This casts a dubious light on all input selectors and switched attenuators. How do you select your attenuation without heating up the soldering iron? Use PGA2310s? Nice, but probably not the best way....
Another question: will Bürklin ship to private persons, esp. if they can add a technical title to their name? I can go through a friend who has a company, but it is so much easier without...
Eric
dynamic effects in capacitors?
What I have been wondering about: are there any other parasitic effects in capacitors besides DA, ESR, ESL? Can the capacitor that decouples the reference of a DAC respond in some nasty way to current surges? Same for decoupling caps on sensitive analog supplies...
Eric
What I have been wondering about: are there any other parasitic effects in capacitors besides DA, ESR, ESL? Can the capacitor that decouples the reference of a DAC respond in some nasty way to current surges? Same for decoupling caps on sensitive analog supplies...
Eric
OS-CON
http://www.capacitorsplus.com/
OS-CON SG series. Small values for local decoupling only available up to 25V. Very good electrolytics, great for digital circuits. They are showing up in a lot of stuff including Mark Levinson products. I have them in my Hot rodded Aleph 3.
H.H.
http://www.capacitorsplus.com/
OS-CON SG series. Small values for local decoupling only available up to 25V. Very good electrolytics, great for digital circuits. They are showing up in a lot of stuff including Mark Levinson products. I have them in my Hot rodded Aleph 3.
H.H.
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