ESR and recapping

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guavatone

Well-known member
Joined
May 21, 2005
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A While back I bought Dick Smith's ESR meter. I tend to find that somethimes, more often than not the old caps don't really have poor ESR coampared to the new one( i tend to spurge for the best).

Case in point, Klark Tektik D780 Reverb(1980's) caps in the power supply were lower ESR .2 compared to Panasonic-NHG .36 -

This is one scenario but other units I knew needed to be recapped because of humm/noise, showed that caps wern't too leaky. I changed caps anyway and the unit sounded f#@ing great and quiet.

Any ideas?

bad ESR meter?
old caps had fine ESR but no capacitance anymore?
 
I have a capacitor wizard ESR meter and although I think its works fine I have found the same : older caps don't necessarily exibit bad ESR or to a point of determining that the cap is beyond use. In fact , I have found few bad caps with this meter so I'm thinking ESR is not a very common problem with caps in general if I go by what my meter is telling me.

I do think that dried out caps are more of an issue , but no meter or measuring device that I know of will tell you if you have a dried cap.

you simply replace it based on age, and caps have better and tighter
specifications with each newer generation of product lines and offerings.

I have also found that recapping cheaply made gear does not change its tone or sound quality. Adversely, Quality gear will bring out the sound /tone nuances of different types of caps.
 
Caps can lose cap value and still have good ESR

Caps can have good cap value and the ESR can be bad.

I think it has to do with the chemisty and the construction of the electro cap.
 
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