Psvane Teflon capacitors real or fakes?


These are great looking capacitors and supposed to be competing against the Audience, Rel, V-Cap, and Sonicap Teflon capacitors. A couple of my tweaky friends who have no end to new capacitors gave them a try and had one quit after a month or so, and with the wire cut off, no return possible. So they cut it open, yes they are curious, and according to them, the guts looked like mylar, measured like mylar??? Could these not be Teflon caps after all??? I open this for discussion with some of the tweaky electonic minds out there to get to the bottom of this. If they are not genuine teflon, I would not want fellow audiophiles to get ripped by another false claim. But to be fair, real verifiable data should be submitted here, no guesswork. I trust my friends, but I did not do the test, so I open it to other philes. Hey, I like a great deal too, but if it is not as advertised, I get pissed too. Take a look fellow philes, and lets solve the mystery....Jallen
jallen
I have heard good things about the REL's, but have read several reviews where the V-Caps were the preferred caps. What was your break-in time for both caps, and what technique did you do to break them if you did. I have used many caps in the past and some do sound much different with 500 hours on them of pink noise, and cycling every 12 hours. Thanks, Jallen
I have tried the RTX and found them to be a bit compressed sounding, lacking space between instruments. The V-Caps were shrill out of the box, and then went dark at about 200 hours, and at somewhere between 400-500 hours, they became glorious, and all of a sudden everything in the system became suspect. My prior caps were adding a color to the system and removing a layer allowed me to find other weak links. The v-caps allowed the top end to extend like never before....sweet, extended and open. I want to try the CUTF ones, and saw the PSVANE ones, but you can read the story for yourselves. Every circuit may find a different favorite cap, but I believe break in is essential prior to serious evaluation. I have found teflon caps, wires, hookup wire, etc. take a lot of time to break in. I have tried solens and they are OK in a Xover, but not a coupling cap. I use v-Caps, teflon/tin and have trouble finding a description to how they sound. Every recording is so different, their feat is just to get out of the way of the music and let it flow. For a budget cap, I like the Theta polypropylene cap by REL, if you want a decent cap for little money. They are good, but no V-Cap. Arthur Salvatore did an extensive cap eval. and used the REL and V-caps. I have just not found much about the CUTF from V-CAP yet. They may give a mellower sound than the tinfoil ones. Jallen
A streamlined burn-in solution: (http://phonoclone.com/diy-rack.html) The last sentence applies to the film caps, that this thread addresses.
You may wish to dismiss my comments as uninformed, because I have only heard a break-in difference with metalized caps, never with film and foil. Perhaps I just gradually accommodate to the difference without consciously hearing it.

In any case, all the teflons (Vcap, Relcap, Solen) were unused, the RTX was previously used as a coupling cap in an amplifier, the polyp f&f used in power supply filters.

I agree that the RTX appears a bit less clear, but I wonder if this is an accurate perception. Comparing teflon to air, for example, shows that teflon is far from neutral. Yet it is pleasing in one or two places in the signal path, while more can be wearing.

I think that teflon is putting a slight artificial edge onto the program material. The brass bells in Solar Winds seem a bit larger than life, for example. Perhaps teflon re-introduces an edge which is lost in many recordings, or perhaps we are just engineered to be "edge detectors", and so find enhanced edges pleasing.

What do you think?
Sorry but have to disagree. Even the cheap Russian teflons make the mid and high transients very linear and never overshooting (glare) for as long as the circuit is neutral.
I have heard the V-caps in enough circuits and compared with many other caps to feel comfortable stating that they are very neutral, and I hear no edge (with the exception of the first 300 hrs.) And, any " bright sound" has been traced to other parts, tubes, etc. In fact, if they sound harsh, start checking for your weak link, its not the caps. We identified transformers, other caps, interconnects, etc. as adding to the "brightness" of the sound. If you clean the window and don't like the view, don't blame the glass.....jallen
I agree that teflon caps, including the Russian ones, make music sound cleaner and more exciting, especially on transients. Also, I have modded and improved equipment from the ARC SP8 and onwards, so that's a few years worth, and I always started with caps.

To continue with Jallen's analogy, I guess that I see streaks on that window unless I use air gap.
What's needed here is a bunker buster to get Rachel and GF out of hiding.

I'd like to hear more from them.

Hello in there...................
Oh. I thought "chrisvh" posted the truth above on 2/1/12

Also this post on AC which is located here:
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=54218.msg1047092#msg1047092

Have a closer look, Scotty. Here are some search results for the topic in question: http://goo.gl/9ZvYa. Simply click on the "cached" link, to view each page, which is a few days older. They just changed the descriptions, after this minor little translation oversight was uncovered.

I’d made numerous e-mail requests to both Grant and Psvane (since September of 2011) to stop using the V-Cap trademark CuTF. Grant did acknowledge, and took down from their site (although forum posts still remain). Psvane didn’t remove until a few days ago, around the time they posted their official "Mylar" response at Audiogon: http://goo.gl/fhJtX

Perhaps Psvane would have felt differently about trademark use if a competitor borrowed the term “Treasure” to market its own tube line – and this competitor purported to use similar materials to Psvane’s line of tubes. Can’t help but wonder if Psvane would consider this an attempt to "copy", or at the very least an attempt to dilute their brand, as well as unfairly harvest search engine queries for Psvane's product trademark? As many know, there is little hope for trademark protection enforcement with Chinese companies- especially when you're a smaller operation, with little budget to go after large companies. Audiophiles, as a group, are a smart bunch – they can come to their own conclusions on what’s really happened here: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/vendors-bazaar/194521-psvane-teflon-film-copper-foil-caps-600v-rating-starting-99-pair.html

BTW- I had responded to the Audiogon thread Wednesday morning, but it would appear the moderators didn’t feel appropriate to post. Update: Audiogon did finally post my response early this morning (2-3-2012).