Using electrolytic capacitors instead of tantulum?

[carbon]

I've got an old keyboard whose tantulum caps are going bad left and right. I've replaced most of them with electrolytic caps. Keyboard sounds the same to me but got me wondering, for audio applications is there any benefit to using one sort of capacitor over the other?

[cannikin]

Read these:

"picking capacitors"

http://www.capacitors.com/picking_ca...p.htm#tantalum

the "sound" of Capacitors

http://members.aol.com/sbench102/caps.html

happy reading

[triez]

I will bet it is an ARP...I repair them almost weekly, and the tantalums in the power supply and the ones used for power filtering on the various boards always go short circuit. Also the key trigger caps in Omni's and Omni 2's fail regularly. I have had no problems replacing any of these with electrolytics.

To replace tantalums with electros you need to see what they are doing in the circuit. Sometimes manufacturers used tantalums for space reasons, but electro's and tantaluns have very different leakage values, so you can't always sub them. what synth are you talking about?

[carbon]

Originally Posted by triez

I will bet it is an ARP

good guess

ARP Omni-2. Replaced the upper voicing board caps after getting ghost notes on the upper strings a couple years ago. Doing the lower voicing board now after a ghost note made an appearance. Why I didn't replace caps on both boards at the same time is a question I'm asking myself.

Power supply and power filtering caps seem to be holding up so far but I'm guessing those will need replacing eventually.

[triez]

The 2 tantalums on the power supply board and the pairs of tantalums at the power input to each board are ticking bombs - best replace them ASAP as they are very failure prone.