Improving the Coupling Capacitors for Better Tone Sounding

[CJ]

I never did like the sound of mica caps, now I know why

I always liked the look of the RMC ceramic caps with the green paint. Made them sound better.

I like the Fender 10 pf caps with the diamond logo but don't know who made them.

Polycarbonate caps have good tempco specs. Found this out in a 60 cycle oscillator for a power meter tester. The circuit was right in front of a cooling fan. The fan would make the frequency drift from 59 to 62 cps , polycarb fixed the problem.

FM discriminator coils use those weird dog bone caps for low L.

 

[soapfoot]

But is it audible distortion?

I’m not sure if anyone has ever devised a methodology to test this comprehensively

I suspect in the majority of cases the answer would be “no” (or at least “not reliably”), but probably not 100% of all possible use cases

A relevant set of accompanying questions may be:

In which specific applications are very small amounts of distortion likely to be significant?

Does changing dielectric material for every single capacitor in a device yield a different result than changing only one?

Do insignificantly-small amounts of distortion (by percentage) become significant if substantial amounts of gain are later applied (e.g. is the impact greater if the DUT is installed in a microphone before large amounts of preamp gain?)

Might non-objectionable (or even undetectable) amounts of distortion become significant if fed complex program material (of the type that might create intermodulation products)?

Might a listener become, with repeated exposure, sensitive to/aware of small distortion percentages that had been undetectable at first?

Etc.

 

[jokeramik]

But is it audible distortion?

Yes!