[sdiy] Walt Jung and Richard Marsh's Capacitors article

[patchell]

Theo wrote:

>
> > Which ones distort nicely?
> >
>

    I would suspect that the distortion various capacitors make is very
subtle.  The only time I ever ran into the problem was a design I was called in
to figure out what was wrong.  It had a 16 bit ADC, and ahead of was a single
pole low pass filter.  The problem turned out to be the low pass filter, made
with a ceramic capacitor.  They were only getting 12 bit performance rather
than the 16 they were expecting.  Changing the cap to a polystyrene fixed the
problem.  It was difficult to explain to the engineer that a $0.05 ceramic
capacitor was not the same as a$2.00 polystyrene.

    I imagine that there are some people who could probably tell the difference
between the two caps, but I suspect that the effect is so subtle to be next to
un-noticable.

--
 -Jim
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