Low Distortion Chip Capacitors

I guess you mean dielectric absorption ?. Wikipedia have an article on this iirc, which describes the effect and compares dielectrics.

This isn't a golden ears oxygen free copper scenario, is it ?...

Regards,

Chris

You have to spend at least $100 per cap to imbue them with audiophile magic. Total cost of the product should be no less than $5,000 even if the circuit has less than twenty components.

Beats me.. I just get attracted to things with 'super low' in the title. :)

Do you have a preferred type of chip capacitor (ex 1206 size) for audio active filters?

New MONSTERCAP by monstercable! Made with 2oz gold foil and virgin plastic film. Delivered by angels from heaven to an audiophile store new you :P

denon outdid them all with five hundred dollar ethernet cables.

They need the special thermolythic dihydrogen monoxide treatment.

Hope This Helps! Rich

Check for something like "capacitance change with voltage" or so.

Well, I wouldn't use ceramics, that's for sure. I don't know what other materials are available in chip size, other than tantalum and aluminum electrolytics.

But, go ahead and get some samples, design them into something, and report back with distortion figures. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

I'd like to interview the designer that designed that cable. Q1: Was this embarrassing to design? Q2: Where you shocked to discover the msrp? Q3: How do you feel about making a product that is overkill?

Does that translate to warm water?

overkill? hardly. It was a calculated product sold with a pack of outright lies to take advantage of customers with tons of money but not a braincell in operation. Marketing at its finest. Bill Gates would have been proud of them. Move over tice clock, make way for denon!

Digikey has super low distortion chip capacitors in stock. I'll just try'm out.. Or perhaps... I'll check ebay for an Audio Precision System 2.. :P They may be going for cheap if the economy is killing audio companies. :P

I care about low distortion in capacitors and other parts for the purposes of precision instrumentation, not because of any "golden ears." I've tested quite a few C0G dielectric parts, and find them to be a negligible contributor to distortion in the RF filters I design. Coils with powdered iron or ferrite core material are out, but air (or phenolic or similar) core coils generally have very low distortion. Not all mechanical relays are as low distortion as the air core coils and C0G caps, and I've never found a really good solid-state switch that will work over the whole 0.1-100MHz range.

You can get C0G caps up to 0.1uF in surface mount...

Cheers, Tom

The only miniature caps with inherantly low distortion I can immediately think of are AVX's (formerly Corning) monolithic glass caps; basically layers of glass and aluminum fused into a solid block. Limited range of capacitance and very, very expensive. NASA likes 'em.

Sound like perfect audiophile hardware? :)

My Sony XDR-F1HD tuner uses some type of surface mount coupling caps in the output stage, at 1uF and 2.2uF. They don't look like electrolytics, so I assume ceramic and not stacked film. The two-transistor stage adds distortion and a hack replaces it with a opamp active filter but retains the cap. If I'm going to hack mine, I wanted to bypass those caps with polypropylenes, the whole circuit would be on a piece of perfboard as I'm not up to working on surface mount. If I knew what the capacitors were, I might just leave them in the circuit.

It >would< be nice to know what the "best" surface mount caps are, in terms of DA and DF.

--Damon

How about polyproplene through hole?

George H.

Surface-mount PPS?

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Filter1.jpg

John

NP0 porcelain capacitors are low distortion. All the other ceramics are nonlinear WRT voltage.

Unfortunately any ceramic that gives you a highish value in a small package is very nonlinear and piezoelectric too boot.

ow

There are SMT film capacitors. They are so touchy as to be useless. I made the mistake of designing some in. I had to change to C0G capacitors in a bigger package.

I was after 2% capacitors not super duper low distortion.

I want to know the best I can do with chip capacitors. And... I only do smt. And.. I hate drilling holes and using gigantic parts.

I'm wondering about this as a PP competitor.

'Designed for high-frequency filtering applications, the CF Series of surface-mount MLCCs (multilayer ceramic chip capacitors) is said to be a less expensive, smaller and more reliable alternative to SMT plastic film capacitors for designers of consumer audio equipment and PLL mobile phone circuits. '

'Low distortion and low shock noise make these capacitors appropriatefor use in analog or digital mobile devices. Superior heat-resistance, high breakdown voltage, and mechanical strength make these capacitors appropriate for replacing film capacitors. Applications Signal line for AV products Analog signal coupling applications PLL circuit of mobile phones Good temperature characteristics for time constant circuits, oscillation circuits and filters '

However, there's no data on the distortion which makes this part a bit mysterious.

Not bad. :)