Best Capacitors for Crossovers

I should have added, this is the soldering station I use, from Aoyude. Includes various sized tips, which have been a god-send. Cheaper kits don't usually include extra tips. Hakko is the usual standard for soldering stations, but I think Parts Connexion may a knock-off even cheaper. Just make sure you get a variety of tips.

But for your testing, I'd really encourage you to stay away from soldering. :) Screw down terminals will be fine.

Best,

Erik

Unlikely you ruined the cap by heat to be honest. It is possible, but my goodness you would have to turn it up to 800 degrees or more and hold it there for a long time. By long I mean over a minute or two. 

Also, the best sounding resistor I have used is made by Path Audio. I think Parts Connextion sells them. Very good indeed and a tad expensive to be sure.

These new CMR caps from Clarity look interesting. Love to know if they sound as musical and lovely as the Duelund and Jupiter copper foils caps? While the V-caps are rated very well I never liked their uber detail and relative thin sounding character. I hope the Clarity CMR cap is not from that sonic camp? 
 

Vaguely, caps are often not rated to withstand more than 200 degree environments, electrolytics and film. Of course there are exceptions, and higher temp caps. Also, this is usually rated lifetime. LIke, 10,000 hours at 105C or something. The cooler they stay, the more life. The hotter, the faster they can die. Using high temp caps also means longer lasting in the same circuit.

I think this is very much in the scale of temperature we are talking about. Even low temp solder can’t melt until it reaches 360 degrees or so. So yeah, holding a soldering iron to the leads for a while can really damage a cap. I usually have my iron around 620-650 depending on how much metal has to heat up, BUT....

The time of exposure matters a lot. A quick hot iron can expos parts to less total thermal energy than a slow one, and therefore the internals of the cap will heat up less.

Anyway, this is all theory. :) The fact that the cap that failed was in fact exposed as I was worried about kind of explains it in my mind. :)

The cap is dead anyway. Try again and make sure you can solder fast. Lesson learned.

Best,

Erik

Side question: what do you guys recommend for a tweeter protection cap in an active system? Protection for DC on amp turn on, or eventual active crossover malfunction.

A good rule of thumb in an active system is the protection should be set two octaves below the tweeter crossover point. For my case, xo is 2000Hz so I'm looking at 500Hz. The calculations show the ideal cap for my tweeter and for 500Hz would be 65uF, which is large and expensive. Several of the top lines mentioned here don't even have caps this large.

Since it was only for protection I initially thought a less expensive cap would do. But the whole signal goes through it. What do you recommend?

thanks!