Cap. rolling with PhonoII

[NealG]

It’s been a while but I’ve been capacitor swapping again. This time in PhonoII’s output stage.

I’ve been using the standard Orange drops as originally supplied since I built it. These are great all round caps. Their only real downside sonically is one of omission. They sound balanced but just don’t seem to really resolve low level detail and dynamics.

So I lined up some low cost alternatives to try, Solen’s, Aeon’s, RS Yellow’s and the Soniqs SAX.

By far the worst out of all of these where the Solens. Grey, drab, dull, boring! The Aeons where better adding a bit more body to the sound but still not right. Surprisingly the RS Yellow Polyprops sounded very good. Balanced and with good low level detail they were very nice to listen to, a bit like the Orange drops but with more detail, however, they where just a little too polite, sitting on dynamics a touch.

The best, and I feel embarrassed to say it on the WD BB, are the WD SAX caps. These where by far the best sounding or rather they where *not* the best sounding because as far as I could tell they had no obvious sound at all. They seem to be superbly neutral with a see through clarity, devoid of any obvious traits.

I’m trying not to sound like an advert for Peter (cough!) but they are a very good cap. The only downside is the limited range available, I would be tempted to try some in my amp. and also in the C10/11 position in PhonoII but they don’t come in those values unless Peter know better….