Self on Audio, 3rd Edition

Chapter 17Self-improvement for capacitors

The linearisation of polyester capacitors (Linear Audio, Volume I, April 2011)

This article described a phenomenon I stumbled across when checking for capacitor distortion. An ideal capacitor is a perfectly linear component, but some real types of capacitor create easily measurable distortion when they have a significant signal voltage across them. For electrolytics, this is as low as 80 mV rms, but some non-electrolytic capacitors (there really should be a better name for them than that), such as those with a polyester dielectric, require voltages of 9 Vrms to generate about 0.0015 % THD, so the problem is on another scale entirely. This is just as well, as while electrolytic capacitor distortion can ...