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In Reply to: RE: Also small caps first? posted by WilHenry on March 04, 2009 at 13:57:53
Neither the wire gauge nor the order of cap placement may make any audible difference, but it is just good practice to keep the lead wires short and use the smallest practical gauge, and to put the smallest cap closest to the connection. Mechanical damping is also important, especially with a high-permeability material such as TI Shield.
Follow Ups:
I know this is supposed to be a low cost tweak but were higher quality caps tried? If we're using 5N Ag wire instead of copper bell wire then maybe better caps are in order? Any suggestions? BillF
Edits: 03/05/09
There's not a lot of better cap around than a good silver mica. The problem is that they're physically large for a given value, and accordingly, larger values (more than .22uF or so) are extremely rare when available at all. Even .22s are quite big (relative to other .22s) and rather pricey and rare.
Bass is supposed to sound big. 6.5" is not a woofer size.
Please note my dual status as reviewer and manufacturer. Take EVERYTHING I say with a grain of salt.
Silver mica caps still have a distinctly unpleasant sound to my ears when compared to nothing, though they aren't as bad as most. For sizes between a few thousand picofarads and 0.1uF, I would go with WIMA MP3 vaccuum epoxy impregnated paper. Nothing better than locking the capacitor windings or plates in place, as opposed to layers of very thin mica vibrating against each other. Very neutral sounding. I even use a bank of them for my tweeter crossover. For the smaller sizes, I often go with glass passivated junctions, such as various values of bidirectional transient voltage suppressors... the past ... but I use them mostly in signal applications, such as interstage filters and analog power bypasses. They wouldn't (for instance) be very useful as local digital bypasses, or (of course) in any (non passive) filter uses near the voltage rating. Within those guidelines, they are probably the best cap I've tried :)
I tried various types of caps when I first investigated the speaker cable filter, and settled on the silver-mica as the best of the lot. However, I did not include metallized paper in that testing.
Since then, I've experimented with AC filters and found that the Wima MP3 are the best-sounding of the rated types. A friend of mine has compared the silver-mica against metallized paper on his speaker cable filters and he definitely prefers metallized paper.
Another drawback of the silver-mica caps IME is that they have magnetic leads. The Wima metallized paper caps do not. The Evox-Rifa metallized paper do.
My only concern with Wima metallized paper is that the smallest value they make is 1000 pF. Smaller caps do improve the action of speaker cable filters.
All good then. I'm just trying to understand and ask for education in an area that I know little about.
Thanks for the info!
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