Reforming capacitors (technical description, not politics)

[drlegendre .]

I get the jab you're taking at latter-day Audiophool idiocy, but you won't
find any gold-plated OFC business in any of the vintage gear I typically
work with.

But as far as gold plating goes, gold is a good conductor, it solders very
well, it doesn't tarnish and its ductility promotes solid connections on
screw terminals - it's really these characteristics that make it somewhat
desirable in certain applications. So it's not so much that gold "sounds
better", it's that it allows one to make connections that work better.

But it does tend to wear quickly.

Silver is as good or better, and while it does tarnish, my understanding is
that the tarnish has virtually the same conductivity as the parent metal..
and silver is much cheaper than gold.

Now to really shoot the wad.. IME, silver +does+ have a sonic artifact, at
least in the systems where its used to a very large degree (as high purity
wire) in the audio path. That said, I've never liked the "silver sound" in
the systems where I believe I could hear a signature.

Of course, since no other factors were controlled, I can't say that the
audio artifacts I've heard were due entirely to the dominance of of
metallic silver in the conductors..

On Wed, Jul 29, 2015 at 5:19 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Jul 2015, drlegendre . wrote:
>
>> Incidentally, what exactly differentiates a computer-grade cap from any
>> other alum. electrolytic?
>>
>
> Maybe computer-grade don't need gold-plated oxygen-free leads?
>