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In the Forum: Melquiades Amplifier
In the Thread: The Melquiades bass channels: the coupling capacitor.
Post Subject: “Cooked” caps: do not try it home….Posted by Romy the Cat on: 8/14/2007

In fact am not only planning to try an electrolytic capacitor as the LF Milq’s coupling  (if I found one with low linkage capacitance) but I would also planning to try the “my proprietary” cooked capacitors. I have to admit that it sounds very stupid and my discovery of that effect was stupid but it the result does “sound” very nice…

It was 7-8 years ago when I built an external box for my Bidat DAC’s power supply:

The power supply has a dozen or so electrolytic capacitors, notoriously bad by default and while I was taking the transformer outside of the DAC I decided to change the filtering caps to some better audio-quality caps. I had a few sets of “better” caps, which I changed but I did not like the results and I decided to put the old caps back.

When I did it I accidentally mixed up polarity in each and single cap that I put to that power supply – the markings were opposite to the conventional and I was quite sloppy. In a few seconds after I turned the DAC up I heard the typical capacitors cracking and felt some tiny smoke.  I turned the unit off as saw that the caps near-exploded, become larger and got in near oval shape. I do not know what triggered me to do it but I reversed the polarity of the caps and turned the DAC of. The unit went off, the filter still was working. How bit my surprise was when I learned that the DAC’s lower bass become insultingly better then the bass that I was accustom to get from Bidat?

I figured out that I most likely re-polarized the caps. I soldered out and trashed the cooked “puffed” capacitors and put in the set of the better unpolarized caps. How big my surprise was what the best unpolarized caps were not able to hold ground (after they break-in) in reference to the “cooked” caps. I remember that I was diving in a garbage container, trying to fish out my trash-bag with my pulled off cooked capacitors. I was able to recover the “cooked” caps and even as now my best Bidat has those ugly “cooked” capacitors. I never changed my DAC since then and never had even motivations to do so. I never also have any reason to complain about bass problem with my digital.

So, in  few weeks when I will be listening electrolytic cap as a coupling in my Super Milq bass channel I am consider to pre-cook a few caps. It might be a little danger to use the “cooked” caps at high voltage but from a different perspective… I never turned my Bidat off and it has been running with the cooked caps for over 7 years ….

Rgs, the Cat

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