I have often wondered why I never see any decent capacitors (small values) in whatever consumergoods I take apart, Like Pana FCs or FMs or like. It is allways some Chinese brands, of which some barely qualifies as capacitors.
At best they can be small firecrackers.
Is it only diyers who use the good stuff or......?😱
At best they can be small firecrackers.
Is it only diyers who use the good stuff or......?😱
consumer electronics has to be be cheap, industrial electronics is something completely different...however if the cheap stuff gets the job done (big questionmark!), shouldn't we think about our preconceptions?
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as you know a cent increase in parts cost resembles at an euro increase at retail price (ok maybe not that much, but neverless)...now think about the choice a customer would make!
Back in time, I bought a handfull of those very cheap caps on Ebay, planning to do some experiments, tests. Never got to that, since they were already bulgin when they arrived and smelling like catwee. Maybe they could sense that I intented to connect them to a powersource😀
Agreed. Consumer electronics are built down to a (very low) price and to be able to do that, every component sourced needs to be the cheapest possible.
That doesn't neccessarily mean Chinese components, though. Open up something made in Korea, and you're likely to find caps of Korean manufacture.
It also means skimping on specs down to the point where there's no longer much of a margin for error. A limited lifetime is most likely the result, and no doubt in many cases a deliberate choice of the manufacturer. I think when it comes to consumer electronics, from the manufacturer's point of view, the ideal product is one that works well enough not to get too many warranty claims, but that needs replacement after a couple of years.
My work is in industrial electronics, for electrolytic caps, most of our custimers specifiy BC/Vishay, Nichicon, Rubycon, Sanyo or Matsushita (Panasonic). Only one customer wants Yageo caps in some circuits.
Most of these products are expected to work 24/7 for many years before being replaced, so it's more than likely that these are over-engineered.
This stuff isn't designed to last or to be repaired. You can't afford to open a $29 DVD player- just toss it and buy another. Receivers and such from the classic era, maybe into the late '80s were built well. Pretty much everything today that's consumer oriented, is cost reduced to the max. If it weren't, nobody would/could buy it. Performance is no longer considered by the mass market.
Of course not so. Everyone wants and thinks of performance. But most also think of money. Ideally, people should think of price to performance ratio, but this is irrelevant because most (if not all) manufacturers have no working idea of the concept of "price to performance ratio".
Only the very hard core DIYers know how and where to invest any X dollars to get the most sound improvement. But I can see that some manufacturers such as Rotel have used Wima MKP in certain positions of their cheap amps circuit.
There is also local manufacturer who uses cheap styroflex(?) capacitor (in pF range) in their $20 amps (around the tone control) and can deliver sweet treble as a result (and the amp was very successful).
Expensive products will of course use good stuff. The more expensive the product, the more "overpriced" it will be, and the more it goes toward "cost no object".
Most DIYers, especially the beginners, also don't know how to achieve a product with high performance to cost ratio. They don't even care sometimes. Because it is a hobby. An expensive hobby.
Maybe not always intentionally, but it is a result of skimping on specs and quality. But even if an appliance lasts quite a while, chances are technological advances renders it obsolete and it's going to be discarded anyway.
Yeah, garbage caps everywhere a store is involved. In pro motor drives by AllenBradley, TB woods etc you will find nichicons with ultimate life, but with the 400v ratings the salvage ones don't help much in hifi work. I lost my computer two weeks ago due to 5 year old caps on the mainboard, bulging visibly. Hard to get out with the silver solder, I to use a 130 w iron to remove and had to drill the holes out after removing the old cap. Last week the 8 year old HDTV converter forgot the name of all the channels in town after 3 days off. What you want to bet memory backup is a "supercap"? My gift (Christmas) Pentium 4 computer from my brother worked a week before the hard drive quit writing- signature of leaky caps that haven't been turned on for a long time. The CRT terminal I was using with that computer hasn't failed, but left visible cap slime on the desk it was on. I've bought about $200 in" long life" e caps in the last two years to keep using stuff I like and stop sending it to the landfill. What you want to bet the whole ROHS fiasco in Europe which makes electronics so difficult to repair was caused by the PC display, which has a pound or so of lead in it for X-ray shielding and had a design life of 11 months, due to the cheap e-caps.
I am right now replacing all the caps in a Nad C-162 preamp. The originals are JH brand which has a bad reputation, and the preamp is 8 years old, so I might just as well do it now. I have it open anyway to replace the trafo, which suddenly stopped working with an open primary.😕
equipment failure is nowadays almost limited to the power supply caps, where bad parts quality has direct impact. However this usually doesn't apply to all the 'fear' caps spread all over the pcb.
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