Do old speakers need new capacitors?

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Do old speakers need new capacitors?

I know older amplifiers need to have the capacitors replaced to maintain optimal performance. But what about old speakers? Do they need to be re-capped too?

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[ddude003]

The short answer is yes... The long answer is the lifetime is variable based on capacitor type, usage profile and temperatures... Google is your frenemy... Many capacitor manufactures have lifetime information available in their spec sheets for their products...

https://cds.cern.ch/record/2038610/files/45-56-Gallay.pdf maybe more than you ever wanted to know...

And there is this nice list of audio capacitors... http://www.humblehomemadehifi.com/Cap.html

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Very interesting, thanks for the info. Do you happen to have any idea of what the audible manifestation would be, if any?

Regards,
Wayne

 

[ddude003]

Very interesting, thanks for the info. Do you happen to have any idea of what the audible manifestation would be, if any?

Regards,
Wayne

Your welcome... Sound deterioration, reduced dynamics, frequency drift... Eventually the crossovers may not stay within driver specs and cause damage to your drivers...

 

[Kerry Armes]

Do old speakers need new capacitors?

I know older amplifiers need to have the capacitors replaced to maintain optimal performance. But what about old speakers? Do they need to be re-capped too?

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

It's really only electrolytic capacitors that would ever need to be replaced. Poly caps don't suffer from the same problems. The only real way for a poly cap to go bad is to send it way too much power. They can be out of tolerance from the manufacturer, but they won't really drift from that over time.

Failing or failed caps will lead to the values being off from spec. This could be the actual capacitance or the ESR, both of which could cause frequency response issues since the crossover will no longer have the values it was designed to have.

If a capacitor measured to spec, age won't make it sound bad on its own.