[sdiy] Curious capacitor in Music Easel ring modulator

[ChristianH]

My guess ist that in 1973 it wasn't practical to use a non polarized 
4.7 u cap - wasn't it that about anything beyound 1 uF was electrolytic
back then?

Christian



On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:10:02 -0400 Aaron Lanterman
<lanterma at ece.gatech.edu> wrote:

> Totally hypothetically speaking, suppose one was breadboarding the  
> "balanced modulator" shown here:
> 
> http://rubidium.dyndns.org/~magnus/synths/companies/buchla/Buchla_2080_5_200.jpg
> 
> Should I - I mean, the hypothetical "one" - really put in C1, which is  
> a 4.7 muF electrolytic cap? I see no particular reason to believe the  
> voltage on one side of it would be consistently higher than the  
> voltage on the other, which gives me pause and makes me wonder about  
> it in the original circuit. (I've seen electrolytic caps like that in  
> other Buchla stuff, where it looks like it's meant as a DC block, but  
> I can't see any reason to assume one side would be higher voltage than  
> another which feels dubious given that it's an electrolytic. I have  
> heard that electrolytics can take a bit of AC action as long as the DC  
> isn't going the wrong way, but that feels dubious too.)
> 
> - Aaron