"Five terms from the list below" ?? Is this a joke? I'll give you a list! *Incessantly shakes hands in the air*
Here's the email I sent to PeterC:
An interesting little side note; I had some Elna Starget electros sitting around and since I was short on parts, I decided to build one channel with those and the other channel with the Panasonic caps. The difference is absolutely amazing. On my first couple listens, the Starget channel has higher frequency response, much cleaner transient response, lower distortion/more headroom and an audibly lower noise-floor. I will do some objective tests on this soon.
I'm certain this sonic difference is solely due to the caps. When I was building, I tested EVERY resistor and was able to get exact values (or at least identical sets) for every position on both channels.
My question to you; the Stargets I had lying around were 100uF, not 47uF. (the 22uFs before the ferrites are the correct values).
Is the better performance due to the higher quality or the higher capacitance value?
Also, the only 100uF Stargets are 35v not 63v. I assumed this was related to the phantom power, so I haven't used phantom on the Starget channel yet.
After writing that, I considered that the appearance of more highs could be an auditory trick of a LACK OF LOWS. To test my theory, I did some frequency plots.
http://www.puzzlefactory.com.au/Green+Stargets.gif
But as you can see, this theory was (thankfully) incorrect.
Overall, the Starget's frequency response is a lot smoother.
Understand that this is not a scientific test using the same sample, it's me singing the part twice. (But it's a peak graph over 30 seconds)
I'm a little reluctant to post samples because they're of ME singing.
Incidentally, I am very aware that 50 is close to 48. :wink:
The reason I asked the question is because I'm wondering how the 48v is "getting so far into the circuit." Shouldn't the first set of caps decouple the whole circuit? I'll be the first to say I'm no electronics mastermind.
After researching today, seems that Stargets are discontinued. (No mention anywhere on Elna's site) They seem to have been replaced with Cerafine, SILMIC & SILMIC II. I am yet to obtain some of these.
WES Components has them, but they're far too expensive (au$3.95ea!)
The other problem is the limited range of available values.
http://www.audio-cube.nl/elnaform.htm