I swapped from the Standard Z to the Q4 and noticed an immediate difference. To be fair, I had been listening to the Standard Z for a couple of weeks before they calmed down. They were very sibilant and lacked clarity. So, I will give the Q4 some time to break in.
The difference that I heard was the Q4 was very dry, lacked air around the singers, lacked dynamics and sounded flat, sound stage wise.
So after some break in time we will see what happens with them. Hoping they open up.
Drop a wima in there.
I would say the Q4 are a good basic inexpensive poly cap. They aren’t bland or uninvolved like the Daytons tend to be.
The Standard Zcaps however can be from the other side of neutral. Sometimes the effect they have is good, other times they can sound shrill, forced, bright, or hot. Overly sparkly could be a good description. Acoustic guitar, or something recorded in a room with lots of reverberance tends to shine with these caps. On my Vijon build with the RT1.3 planar, they sound great. I didn’t like them with the AMTHR4 in my Hancocks.
I agree, the standard Z did not sound good at all, at first. took a good long time to smooth out. They cost about the same as the Q4 so I thought I would compare them. Thanks for the input, Ben.
Pretty sure those are the caps that made me literally flinch with how shrill they were in the Hancocks.
Yep, they are, Brad.
Reverberation depth and length are my focus when evaluating crossover tweaks and special caps
Thanks Ben
the second tier caps, like the Dayton polys seem to have less depth
I would agree that the Dayton caps have a very flat soundstage. There really isn’t much depth to them.
When it comes to qualities different capacitors can provide, it comes down to what the listener wants. Some have an emphasis in a certain bandwidth, or is more (etched) or less (rounder) articulate or detailed at the job. Some have the soundstage depth of an immense or vast nature (bloom), whereas others impart a smaller and more focused quality. Of course, fizzy, spitty, gritty, bright, dull (warm), etc also exist.
To top it off, good driver plus good cap does not always equal good result, and combinations of cap types (like in bypassing) can create other problems. On a project several years ago, I had a bypass cap on the treble resistor to lift the top octave a bit, 0.1uF value. I wondered if I needed more, and added a 0.33uF cap of different makeup/mfr to it. This resulted in an audible echo in the sound where the source was cleanly heard playing twice with between them in delay. I still don’t know why this occurred. Because of this, I typically avoid paralleling of different type or brand capacitors. However, I have never had issue with paralleling a small mylar capacitor to match values required due to capacitor tolerance.
Rolling caps can be rewarding.