Caiman passive output mod revealed

[Reid Malenfant]

This may be a daft question, but has anyone considered paralleling a film & electrolytic to attempt to get the best of both worlds?

Common thing in PSUs

[Clive]

This may be a daft question, but has anyone considered paralleling a film & electrolytic to attempt to get the best of both worlds?

Common thing in PSUs

Not so common in coupling positions but a cheapish (eg clarity or obliggato) film with a silver mica bypass or teflon bypass could be really worth trying.

[Ali Tait]

Glad to see others are trying out different caps I'm still finding the bass from the 10uf MKP2000 to be lacking, its warm sounding but light, gives a hint of being glazed over.

I gave a pair of well run in 1uf Multicap RTX's a try, those seemed quite promising after a warm up, very detailed with a hint of warmth, quite fast sounding but can lack body

I also have some 2.2uf copper Obligato's to try as well as some 2uf PIO Obligato's

The film caps are obviously a better cap than the electrolytics although funny thing is the films also have different signatures, you just got to try as many as you can guys until you find your preferred flavour I'm still on the hunt for the cap which adds least amount of flavour so if anybody has any idea's let us know

SCR teflons! Buut,they are not cheap...

[Reid Malenfant]

Not so common in coupling positions but a cheapish (eg clarity or obliggato) film with a silver mica bypass or teflon bypass could be really worth trying.

Agreed, though it's more often done on single rail amplifier outputs that need the DC isolation.

It just occured to me as some members mentioned a difference in the bass end that they felt a little lacking.

Perhaps someone might try it some time & report back what the hear

[StanleyB]

.can other cdps/dacs benefit from this, and if so, why don't other manufacturers do this?

It won't work in every design. As to why others don't do it? Well I like to experiment beyond the theory and established convention. History tells us that British engineers are good at that.

[RoboCopper]

It's explained here: http://www.v-cap.com/coupling-capacitor-calculator.php

Thank you Mark.
Thank you Clive.
So many things to read, calculate, listen and learn

[Clive]

Agreed, though it's more often done on single rail amplifier outputs that need the DC isolation.

It just occured to me as some members mentioned a difference in the bass end that they felt a little lacking.

Perhaps someone might try it some time & report back what the hear

It's worth trying, synergy is sometimes hard to predict!

[MartinT]

ClarityCaps: was just watching James Taylor & Carole King in concert on BBC4 and the sound was superb, a real sense of you-are-there with audience noise and realistic instruments. These caps are coming on strong now.

[gr0001]

I also have a question regarding the passive mod. If I remove the opamp board and put the capacitors in, does this make both variable and fixed output passive or just only the variable one??

Any hints regarding this?

[StanleyB]

Both would be passive of course. You would have removed the amplification stage after all .