"
If you can’t tell the difference between a Dayton 1% and a TRT Teflon 1%. I understand..
I can. They are night and day. Some folks can’t tell the difference, because they actually don’t have the chops. "
Well it is more than that. I believe that a lot of fancy capacitors and tube amps with that warm sound really are adding distortion that many people find appealing. Some like blue others like brown. The "signature" sound of various audio companies or components is merely their flavor of distortion. For instance if you went to concert I can imagine they used professional amps and speakers. To duplicate exactly what you heard there you either have to use the same equipment or have a method of altering your playback in such a way as to be able to do so with what you own. Anything else is flavoring to suit personal preferences which to many is what it really is all about anyway. I happen to like faithful true to real life audio replication.
My answer is to use neutral everything I can which in the case of capacitors would be those that measure well and perform their electrical duty without flavoring. It gets me closer to real life on old speakers I rebuild for people. Those fancy caps are not used in all those venues people pay big bucks to go hear live music at.
For my personal systems I use a Xilica XP3060 to DSP and bi-amp and from there I can change anything I need to match your flavor of cap. Or your special "warm" tube amp. As a matter of fact I can sit there with my Laptop plugged into the Xilica and change parameters on the fly live if I wish to achieve a certain effect. The advantage of this is that for what some of you spend on one set of caps that will work in one place and way only I bought a method of doing anything I want to any speaker I happen to own to the very upper limits of what that speaker is capable of producing. If I am wanting to have more than one set of speakers to listen to I can store presets for each pair of speakers I own up to 30. Or I can have various presets according to what I want to hear that night with that music genre for the same set of speakers.
It requires time and some learning far beyond what sticking a set of caps on a crossover amounts to but once you jump the hurdle a whole new world opens up and you never go back. Passive crossovers are the way things used to be but no longer have to be.
I can. They are night and day. Some folks can’t tell the difference, because they actually don’t have the chops. "
Well it is more than that. I believe that a lot of fancy capacitors and tube amps with that warm sound really are adding distortion that many people find appealing. Some like blue others like brown. The "signature" sound of various audio companies or components is merely their flavor of distortion. For instance if you went to concert I can imagine they used professional amps and speakers. To duplicate exactly what you heard there you either have to use the same equipment or have a method of altering your playback in such a way as to be able to do so with what you own. Anything else is flavoring to suit personal preferences which to many is what it really is all about anyway. I happen to like faithful true to real life audio replication.
My answer is to use neutral everything I can which in the case of capacitors would be those that measure well and perform their electrical duty without flavoring. It gets me closer to real life on old speakers I rebuild for people. Those fancy caps are not used in all those venues people pay big bucks to go hear live music at.
For my personal systems I use a Xilica XP3060 to DSP and bi-amp and from there I can change anything I need to match your flavor of cap. Or your special "warm" tube amp. As a matter of fact I can sit there with my Laptop plugged into the Xilica and change parameters on the fly live if I wish to achieve a certain effect. The advantage of this is that for what some of you spend on one set of caps that will work in one place and way only I bought a method of doing anything I want to any speaker I happen to own to the very upper limits of what that speaker is capable of producing. If I am wanting to have more than one set of speakers to listen to I can store presets for each pair of speakers I own up to 30. Or I can have various presets according to what I want to hear that night with that music genre for the same set of speakers.
It requires time and some learning far beyond what sticking a set of caps on a crossover amounts to but once you jump the hurdle a whole new world opens up and you never go back. Passive crossovers are the way things used to be but no longer have to be.