BIG Capacitor News!
31st March 2008
Well, the really big news is that we have moved all our copper foil signal capacitors away from using a paper dielectric to using the same mylar that we use in the silver foil, but we retain the oil, so all our copper foil signal capacitors are now oil filled using mylar instead of paper, one slight abnormality, we have two print machines for these caps and for one of them we have not got the new print blocks that say copper foil/mylar in oil yet, so they still say paper in oil, however the print is now white instead of black, so we can see the difference, I know this is confusing, but it is temporary, I can assure you!
Why did we move to oil filled mylar from oil impregnated paper you may well ask?
When truth be told we have been experiencing increasing problems with the failure rate of our paper in oil capacitors over the past 3 to 4 years and despite a major research program into the causes of this increasing break down rate we have really come up with a blank, which makes me suspect that the cause has to do with subtle changes in the chemistry of the paper, the oil or some other key part of the caps, possibly due to new environmental requirements imposed on the production of the paper, who knows? Anyway, when it became obvious that we were unable to fully establishand rectify the cause, my engineers and I decided to give mylar a go again as the first experiments we did with oil imperegnated mylar was not sonically satisfactory, so this time we changed the construction to oil filled, the materials sealing the capacitor and the way we connect the foil ends to the wires and voila! After some running in, the new mylar/oil filled capacitors actually sound better in most respects than the old paper signal caps they replace, only real drawback in my view is that they take nearly twice as long to run in and sound quite a bit worse than the old paper/oil type when they are new, so there you are, you dont get something for nothing!
Due to the problems that have emerged with the paper in oil signal capacitors I have decided that we should replace any faulty copper bodied Audio Note copper foil paper in oil caps that any of you have*, all you need to do is send them back to me here at Montefiore Road in Hove and they will be replaced free of charge with one of the new mylar versions. One thing though, you need to mark each capacitor up with what is wrong with it, if you dont mind.
* Please remember that this replacement offer only covers copper bodied Audio Note capacitors and DOES NOT cover the previous yellow / gold bodied versions.