What is an "audio grade" electrolytic capacitor?

[treez]

Does it have an especially long life?
Does it have a minimal increase in ESR over time?

Is its ESR very very low, compared to "normal" electrolytics?

What defines it as an "audio grade" electrolytic?

 

[rfredel]

Hello treez,

every good elektrolytic capacitor or normaly capacitor is "audio grade".

Some "Audio gurus" think, that they can hear differences between capacitors. They say, this one have a better "sound" than the other. So they say this is "audio grade" and that not, but by measuring they can not give an argument. In my opinion is this only "Voodoo".

Regards

Rainer

 

[godfreyl]

What defines it as an "audio grade" electrolytic?

Marketing nonsense.

There's a whole audio "tweak" industry out there. For example, there's people who spend $1000+ on mains cables to connect their audio equipment to the wall socket, pay $$$$ for equipment that claims to demagnetize their LPs and CDs, or suspend their loudspeaker cables above the floor with (expensive) wooden blocks etc etc - the list goes on and on.

There are also some simple tweaks you do at no cost that allegedly improve the sound quality of your system. a couple of the wilder ones involve putting a photo of yourself in the freezer and tying a knot in the curtain cords in another room.

OK, it April fool's day, so I'd better back that up with links to a few products. Here's Cable Elevators, $1000+ Power Cables and Quantum Purifiers

Finally, the king of them all: MACHINA DYNAMICA, home of the legendary "magic pebbles", as well as teleportation, alien time coordinate disentanglement, bits of copper foil you can stick on your windows, and much more.

 

[treez]

thanks,
I always thought all that "audio advice" that you point out was nonsense.

Ive heard people saying how putting smps's to feed audio amps makes them sound worse, worse than mains transformers.....its all bunkum.

There are people selling resonant smps's to people saying that if its not a resonant smps, then you'll get too much audio noise, but again its all nonsense.

 

[betwixt]

Good catches godfreyl i now realize I'm in the wrong business.

Brian.

 

[rfredel]

Hello Brian,

I agree with you, but I think we are to good and to honestly to sell Voodoo devices. :-D


Regards

Rainer