Electrolytic Capacitors..which brands?

[Davido]

I have been reading in other forums ( mainly about tube amplifiers) that some brands of electrolytic caps are are prone to malfunction (even to the point of exploding!). These caps were properly spec'd and installed by qualified techs.

Any suggestions as to which brands are typically reliable and/or which brands to avoid?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers

Dave

 

[Externet]

Some capacitors fail, yes, but mostly poorly chosen on design. More than caring on the brand, choose the correct capacitor for the application with enough tolerance for operating voltage, temperature and spikes.

 

[Davido]

These caps were properly spec'd and installed by qualified techs.

I just wanted to put more emphasis on this part of my original post.

Cheers

Dave

 

[dknguyen]

I do believe there was a bad batch of capacitors that came out sometime back. I forget what company (I thiink it was many). If I recall it was due to them all using a common batch of bad electrolytic that got shipped out. It came up when I was researching what motherboard to buy and apparently it had caused a lot of problems at extended temperature. Not sure if that extends to tube amps though because motherboards are fairly recent and...I don't think tube amps are quite as recent.

I agree that electrolytics are pretty similar for the most part unless there's a bad batch. Electrolytics do dry out and degrade in other ways over time- the equipment might have just been old or the capacitor was sitting on the shelf for too long before it was installed. Or some flaw in the design (or degradation of other parts in the system) was stressing the capacitors and caused them to die prematurely and were symptoms rather than the cause of the problem and that's why the techs replaced the capacitors in the first place. And there's always the possibility that the tube amp was either operated in, or stored in poor conditions.

I'm curious as to where you heard that some brands fail more than others. Because it seems to me that if someone had enough experience to truly claim this, they would also have examples. It's a bit odd to just say that with no follow up unless it was just conjecture. (Really, how are you supposed to tell what brand an electrolytic is anyways? Most of them look the same without no brand markings)

 

[Externet]

---> Techmati - Badcaps - The capacitor failure issue

 

[dknguyen]

Interesting. I've never heard of any of those brands before. When I select components there's usually too many so I just filter out of the brand names I do recognize.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

That are a LOT of sub-standard capacitors out there, stick to good quality ones from a reliable source - like Rubycom and Panasonic.

Don't even thing of using Capxon, they are abysmally bad.

 

[Sceadwian]

Umm.. that whole bad batch of capacitors from stolen forumal article? That story is like 5-10 years old.