Here the article of the other forum:
Capacitor upgrade in crossover - Is it audible?
They say most of the hype about high end capacitors is marketing hype - no differences in measurement.
I would really like to hear the opinions of the members of this forum.
Many thanks in advance for your interest about this thread, Stefano
Capacitor upgrade in crossover - Is it audible?
They say most of the hype about high end capacitors is marketing hype - no differences in measurement.
I would really like to hear the opinions of the members of this forum.
Many thanks in advance for your interest about this thread, Stefano
You'd be much better off reading the articles by the late Cyril Bateman on this or even Doug Self which will help you to understand where the capacitor type might make a difference in a filter.
I won't start people off by saying something inflammatory like 'of course high end passives are hype and possibly worse than industrial grade' 😀
I won't start people off by saying something inflammatory like 'of course high end passives are hype and possibly worse than industrial grade' 😀
Do you have a link to the mentioned articles of Cyril Bateman and Doug Self? Many thanks in advance for this.
My own opinion is not reported yet, i have just tried an executive summary of the outcome of the Audio Science Review article mentioned in #1.
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This thread will likely descend into subjectivists vs objectivists. I second billshurv's recommendation to read a bunch and draw your own conclusions. Here are some excellent links:
Rod Elliott: https://sound-au.com/articles/capacitors.htm
Cyril Bateman (thank you to Jan for hosting these excellent articles): https://linearaudio.nl/cyril-batemans-capacitor-sound-articles
Dielectric does affect capacitor behaviour. Snake oil less so. Industrial R&D > fairy dust.
Edit: Mark beat me to the Bateman link 😀
Rod Elliott: https://sound-au.com/articles/capacitors.htm
Cyril Bateman (thank you to Jan for hosting these excellent articles): https://linearaudio.nl/cyril-batemans-capacitor-sound-articles
Dielectric does affect capacitor behaviour. Snake oil less so. Industrial R&D > fairy dust.
Edit: Mark beat me to the Bateman link 😀
I'm confused. You link to factual measurements and then you ask for 'opninions'?
Are you looking for factual info or just for an answer you like?
Jan
I might be tempted to say 'poor factual measurements' . There wasn't really much thought given to the test setup as far as I can tell or the hypothesis being tested...
The ASR social group is so invested in the sub/obj bun fight that even replacing old electros with known properly functioning substitutes constitutes woo? What a strange point.
Hi all, i think one useful outcome of this thread could be to offer an executive summary of the actual outcome in the topic without the need to achieve a master's degree in electronic engineering first. I have really a master's degree in electronic science but i am out of the electronic engineer business since decades and have some problems to follow articles on a very high expert level. What i would like to know is if there are some members that could make quite reliable listening tests with A / B comparisons of loudspeaker crossover with different grades of capacitors used. We have here in Germany where i come from a quite serious DIY journal - German journal HOBBY HIFI - where the author swears to hear a clearly notable difference between the "standard" and the "high end" version of the passive crossovers even where the price of the chassis material is quite low. My suspicion is that some of the differences come simply from the better tolerance values found in high end capacitors of only two percent or even less in comparison to the tolerance of standard capacitors of 5 percent or even 10 percent. So, the first thing to do for a good comparison is to make an accurate measurement of the capacitor value of the high price component and to find in the batch of the capacitors of standard components grade the one that match the value of the "high end" component as close as possible. I wonder if somebody has done such a thing here in the forum, quite big effort though.
............................................Wiseoldtech runs screaming from the room saying "Oh no!.... not another one of those time-wasting capacitor discussion threads again!"
🏃♂️🏃♂️
🏃♂️🏃♂️
@MEGB1262 ,
Its probably not that simple. We might expect there is a 'threshold of audibility' for all sorts of things, with the threshold point being the level at which 50% of the population can hear a difference and the other 50% can't. Then there is that some speaker drivers may be more revealing of capacitor differences than other drivers. Also, there is a question of what we are supposed to trying to listen for: Frequency response, distortion, stereo imaging, etc? What do we think matters, or do we need to evaluate capacitors in multiple ways?
Regarding how capacitors may differ, the article at: https://www.keith-snook.info/capacitor-soakage.html describes some things people may not always think of. We sometimes tend to think in terms of idealized models, which may not be complete enough for some purposes.
Its probably not that simple. We might expect there is a 'threshold of audibility' for all sorts of things, with the threshold point being the level at which 50% of the population can hear a difference and the other 50% can't. Then there is that some speaker drivers may be more revealing of capacitor differences than other drivers. Also, there is a question of what we are supposed to trying to listen for: Frequency response, distortion, stereo imaging, etc? What do we think matters, or do we need to evaluate capacitors in multiple ways?
Regarding how capacitors may differ, the article at: https://www.keith-snook.info/capacitor-soakage.html describes some things people may not always think of. We sometimes tend to think in terms of idealized models, which may not be complete enough for some purposes.
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Yes, if there is a 10% change in capacitor value, I'd expect that to be audible as it modifies the frequency response.
Doing well-designed and executed A/B comparisons are very hard to do, especially the part to make it double-blind.
It's very rarely done and there's almost always some deficiency.
Jan
This board really needed a new capacitor thread. Must be almost a week since the last one.
It wasn't your point considered strange but that of the ASR poster. 30 year old crossover electros can reasonably be considered suspect but that person's subjective response was to 'blame' those who recommended film caps for sounding too bright? Which tacitly supports the claim of audible differences. For me it's the confusion that arises when technical discussions are constantly blended with personality discussions, pretty much the bulk of ASR's forum content these days with rare exception.
Regarding ESR I would suspect that to be circuit dependent. Does it make sense in a tube coupling circuit to series a 0.0001 DF Teflon coupling cap with a 5k grid stopper? Don't see how.
The ASR post discussed didn't provide measurements.
Re: the tweeter measurements without knowing the base performance floor of the microphone some results have questionable value. Example the multi tone. What is the base multi performance of the capture setup? What was the environmental noise level? Not every graph is science.
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