Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

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mediatechnology
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Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by mediatechnology »

I just stumbled upon the Nichicon Audio capacitor page at Mouser and thought it would be a useful bookmark to have.

http://www.mouser.com/new/nichicon/Nichicon-Audio-Caps/
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JR.
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by JR. »

Good reference... I find the FAB copy silly "acoustic" audio caps?? but drilling down to the spec sheets reveal some real differences.

JR
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Craig Buckingham
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by Craig Buckingham »

Some real interesting posts here.

I went through an exercise of evaluating a whole lot of "audio" grade type electros quite a while ago. Can't remember all of them, but Black Gate (and NP type), Silmic, Cerafine were some of the suspects. Turned out that a much lower priced, general purpose Taiwanese brand electro sounded better than all the higher priced audio grade ones. Cosonic was the Taiwanese manufacturer . I was put onto these by someone that went through the exercise of bench testing many different types for dissipation factor IIRC .

However the conclusion I reached at the time was the even the Cosonic capacitors were flawed when compared to a piece of copper wire. I was evaluating them using audio signal coupling. The higher voltage ones sounded better and a DC bias helped considerably as well.

A saying I like is that the best electrolytic capacitor is no electrolytic capacitor (I am sure I am not the originator of this line). I go to extremes to avoid them wherever possible, I'd rather change a design topology to remove a need for using one. However when a new boat of arrivals appears on the scene it leaves me a little apprehensive once again to assessing their suitability for places where there is no escaping their use.

Looking at the experience of a lot of you this may be old school common knowledge, "been there done that". Hope you don't mind me sharing this experience.
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mediatechnology
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by mediatechnology »

A saying I like is that the best electrolytic capacitor is no electrolytic capacitor (I am sure I am not the originator of this line). I go to extremes to avoid them wherever possible, I'd rather change a design topology to remove a need for using one.
In that case you might want to have a look here...

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=598 :ugeek:
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JR.
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by JR. »

Yup, best cap is no cap... In fact with modern DSP we can even make filters without using those evil components. :lol:

Short of DSP we can use circuit tricks like servo, putting the evil caps inside feedback loops, and more complex machinations like Wayne's DC coupled mic preamp to manage the evil..

I've probably posted this already but Sam Groner did some bench work in recent years to quantify techniques to reduce known distortion mechanisms in electrolytic (IIRC anti-parallel provided first order cancellation of one).

Welcome to the cap haters club...

JR
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ricardo
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by ricardo »

Craig Buckingham wrote:I went through an exercise of evaluating a whole lot of "audio" grade type electros quite a while ago.
Can you tell us how you did your evaluating?
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by Craig Buckingham »

It was a long time ago Ricardo. It was coupling an audio signal between a custom developed DAC and power amplifier. In that exercise the coupling caps were compared to each other and replaced with copper wire as the final test. All tests were done by ear. No test equipment was used. It was pretty easy to determine that the piece of wire was always going to be the least worst offender. Was able to test with DC offset using a 9V battery. That was noticeable. All of the caps types showed similar improvement.

Also they were evaluated for bypassing individual discrete current sourced/sinked open loop shunt regulators on the analog supply pins of the PCM63P-K DAC chips used in the DAC.

I only bypass electros with KP films for analog power pin bypassing, if needed, and always with a damping resistor to reduce potential tank circuit ringing. They weren't needed for the shunt regs.

The Cosonics weren't perfect of course and whilst the audiophool grade stuff did some things good the cheapest cap was overall the most musical and engaging. Black Gates seamed really quiet, flat and revealing but less musical and involving. Like the life was sucked out of the music, timbres were black and white, no colour. They just didn't move the soul and make an emotional connection. The others were more musical in my opinion but still not as good as the Cosonic. But stick a piece of copper wire in their place and it was like thank God, how do we avoid using these things.
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by JR. »

If your listening tests were not blinded, you may have suffered from some expectation bias ("of course the wire sounded better").

I had a few revealing experiences back in the early '80s designing studio effects where it was all about how the effect sounded. I recall one very unnerving experience when I was making tweaks to a delay line flanger in a friends recording studio. I recall taking a break for smokes and coffee (no wacky tobaccy,,I don't even smoke, and the machine coffee kinda sucked) but my ears needed the break.

After about 15 minutes I returned to my tweaking and everything sounded night and day different. WTF???

In my judgement the human ear is like a digital voltmeter with 10 digits of resolution, but only 5 digits of accuracy, so even if you can hear small detail, that same detail may sound different the next time.

I learned to become more reliant on bench testing and find that I can measure things that I can not hear, but I can not hear things that I can not measure.

YMMV and this is a rich topic for disagreement.

JR
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Craig Buckingham
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Re: Nichicon Audio Capacitor Page at Mouser

Post by Craig Buckingham »

Thanks for sharing your experience JR. When I first started doing this stuff I took many dead ends. Had to find my way back out many times. It doesn't happen that much now.

I suffer from very little expectation bias anymore, it was a long time ago that emotional trait was dispensed with. I have no ego about one thing over another.

Sure I do blind A/Bs sometimes. But not very often they are required.

Thought that our conclusions were possibly misconceived and did the tests a few more times over a period of months. Same conclusion, electrolytics are no good. Even the best are still no good.
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