Why have capacitors improved so much over the years?

Good post @fleschler. Tim's U.S.A. doppelganger was Roger Modjeski of Music Reference and RAM Tubes. Roger argued that the use of costly boutique parts was often unnecessary, as their claimed superior involved matters unrelated to the part's function in a particular circuit application, and therefore provided no sonic benefit. He further argued that some boutique parts actually compromise a circuit's behavior, leading to not just inferior sound quality, but in some cases reliability problems. Music Reference products are known for their superior stability and reliability.

And a second on Paravini's EAR tube pre-amps: After auditioning the EAR 912 pre-amp, Art Dudley stated in his Stereophile review that it was the first pre-amp he had heard which challenged the sound of his Shindo. The 912 was out of his reach (mine too ;-), but the excellent 868 is an over-looked nice little pre. Single-ended and true balanced outputs (two stereo pair of each, the latter via Tim's world-famous transformers), able to drive a 200 ohm load!

Roger argued that the use of costly boutique parts was often unnecessary, as their claimed superior involved matters unrelated to the part’s function in a particular circuit application, and therefore provided no sonic benefit.

I totally buy this. A great deal of this is driven by armchair buyers who will nit pick relative quality and value based on parts instead of performance.

Of course, a large part of it is manufacturers attempting to make gear to sell specifically in the high end.  What if the best sounding amp on earth cost $100 to make?  No one would buy it, unless it had meters.  Big, beautiful bouncing meters.

 rather then risk the problems with high maintenance mercury vapor diodes and the isolation transformers for their cathodes that have to be pre-heated and could short circuit.


Have you ever used Mercury vapor Diodes? I don't seem to have any problems with them shorting out,  only the initial preheating is time consuming, after they have been in circuit and the initial 30 minute preheating is accomplished you only preheat for 30 seconds to 1 minute.

@bdp24 They were two of a kind; however, Roger designed circuits requiring perfectly matched output tubes such as he provided for my friend's RM9 amp.  Luckily, the tubes also run conservatively and have an extended lifespan (10,000 hours?).

but…..i have had both my Modjeski RM-4 and RM-9 apart and there are a few very excellent back in the day boutique caps and R in the right places. Engineering Economics is a class some loathe but others can exploit.

one thing to very carefully consider for all the backyard coupling cap replacer chasers…. Does the musical signal at that point in the circuit have enough voltage to form that big bad cap ?