Who makes RELIABLE modern electrolytic caps?

[Michael Black]

On Sun, 17 Feb 2019, Phil Allison wrote:

Fox's Mercantile wrote:


tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:
Yes, the original question was which caps are BEST, but much of my
concern is based on the failed motherboards, which only lasted a year or
so.

Which, as usual, you didn't make at the beginning.

The Failed motherboards were, Dell.
Their "Lets buy cheap shit" almost put them out of business.
And that was almost 20 years ago.


** This old Wiki has the story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

The brands of capacitor involved were previously unknown and unable to be linked to any of the well known makers.

AFAIK the issue never involved electros that might be used in restoration of vintage tube gear.

"tubeguy" is a fuckwit - see " top definition " :

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

People hear the stories, but don't grasp the details. Modern use of
electrolytics is different from the tube days. Not only have values gone
up as size got smaller, but they are often expected to handle much higher
frequencies than 60 or 120Hz in the days of tubes. Electrolytics are also
a lot more common in the days of solid state. In tube days, a bad one
would mean low voltage, or hum, or low audio gain, but there were a
handful of electrolytics. Now they are everywhere, a shift to low
impedance so larger values needed, and that means electrolytics. The
circuitry is now more complicated and a bad capacitor may not be so
obvious as in the old days.

Michael

 

[whit3rd]

On Sunday, February 17, 2019 at 2:13:03 PM UTC-8, Fox's Mercantile wrote:

The Failed motherboards were, Dell.
Their "Lets buy cheap shit" almost put them out of business.

Oh, no, it's not that simple. Dell was publiclly traded, and made formal notice
in their stockholder report one quarter, and that was big news. But, Apple
had similar problems (trust me, I own a couple or three), as did everyone else.

The faulty technology was widely rebranded and even given counterfeit
labeling, and wasn't purged from inventories for some years.

The bad capacitors weren't significantly less expensive than any others on
the market, and turned bad only after a year or so (so incoming tests couldn't
catch the problem).

 

[Ralph Mowery]

In article <d1189f6f-4996-46ef-a3bf-5981483d3f6a@googlegroups.com>,
whit3rd@gmail.com says...

Oh, no, it's not that simple. Dell was publiclly traded, and made formal notice
in their stockholder report one quarter, and that was big news. But, Apple
had similar problems (trust me, I own a couple or three), as did everyone else.

The faulty technology was widely rebranded and even given counterfeit
labeling, and wasn't purged from inventories for some years.

The bad capacitors weren't significantly less expensive than any others on
the market, and turned bad only after a year or so (so incoming tests couldn't
catch the problem).

Yes, it was not only Dell,but other companies. I and a friend had a
mother boards that were bought as boards and were not Dell that the
capacitors went bad. Those boards were highly recommended before the
capacitor problems showed up. Just lucky it was less than a year and
under warrenty. I had a video card or two that had the capacitor
problem.

 

On Sun, 17 Feb 2019 16:12:53 -0600, Fox's Mercantile <jdangus@att.net>
wrote:

On 2/17/19 2:11 AM, tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:
Yes, the original question was which caps are BEST, but much of my
concern is based on the failed motherboards, which only lasted a year or
so.

Which, as usual, you didn't make at the beginning.

The Failed motherboards were, Dell.
Their "Lets buy cheap shit" almost put them out of business.
And that was almost 20 years ago.

It dont surprise me it was Dell. A friend had a Dell that was from the
early 2000s. It had XP on it. It was so frikkin slow I could literally
outtype it, using notepad. She asked me if there was something wrong
with it. I changed some settings and that did nothing. Since there was
nothing on the computer except a few free games, I formatted the hard
drive and reinstalled XP. Still slow.....

Heck, I had a much older and lower powered computer at the time that was
running Windows 98, which was 10X faster than that Dell.

A few years later I got an almost identical Dell computer given to me. I
installed XP on it and was shocked to find it was just as slow as the
friend's computer. I didn't even bother with it any further. I removed
the drives and sent the rest of it to the recycler....

Things may be different with Dell today, but I will never buy any Dell
computers, new or used, after that experience.

I strictly use all IBM/Lenovo computers. They last forever. I still have
one that works fine and is 20 years old. My newer ones I own are great
too.

 

[Fox's Mercantile]

On 2/25/19 10:59 PM, tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:

Things may be different with Dell today, but I will never
buy any Dell computers, new or used, after that experience.

Dell like most PC suppliers have a wide range of models, from
cheap to high end.

It's like saying "I'll NEVER buy another Ford product" because
of the Pinto, or "I'll NEVER buy another Chevy product" because
of the Vega.


--
"I am a river to my people."
Jeff-1.0
WA6FWi
http:foxsmercantile.com