14 Aug
2014
14 Aug
'14
5:06 p.m.
On Aug 14, 2014, at 7:02 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 08/14/2014 02:57 PM, David Riley wrote:
Bob Pease (may he ever rest in peace) was giving a presentation I
was at and told an anecdote of a lecture he was giving to a bunch
of audiophiles. A lot of them were asserting that their favorite
capacitors were best for signal paths because they were "non-
microphonic". Preposterous! All capacitors are microphonic to
some extent. So he arranged a demonstration where a bunch of caps
were put into a sensitive signal path. The only ones that made
any noise at all when smacked with a pencil were the "audiophile"
grade ones.
But yes, my favorite aspect of carbon composition resistors is
what happens to them when you try to dissipate too much power
through them. It's quite impressive. Beyond that, they're just
big, noisy and expensive.
A friend of mine who works in recording always marvels at the
money people will put down for ridiculous RCA cables and the
like. "Those people might think twice if they saw the kind of
cables we run in the studios we made the records in," he says.
He's wrong, though... I'm not sure they've even thought once.
- Dave
It all sounds like an expensive exercise in
masochism to
me, but then the only thing I want from a tube amp is volume and
distortion when I'm playing my guitar through it.
I don't understand audiophile technology anymore--they left me in the dirt when they
started selling gold-plated wall (AC line) sockets.
I recently ran across an audiophile outfit who stated that they use only carbon
composition resistors on the basis that they gave a "warmer" sound than those
nasty film ones. I'd have called the sound "noisy" but then, as I said,
I'm way out of the loop.