Capacitor question

Are all capacitors interchangeable regardless of the material they are made of? Or are just certain materials able to be swapped? i.e. ceramic for electrolytic, or tantalum for something else?

Some places you need non-polar capacitors and so you can not put electrolytics or tantalum capacitors in there unless they too are non-polar (the minority of these types are like that).

Otherwise you can replace whatever with whatever, sometimes for better or for worse.

What he said.

As long as polarity and value (both capacitance and voltage) are observed, you can put any type in. However, the secondary characteristics, like effective series resistance (ESR) and inductance may make the results vary considerably.

For instance, electrolytic caps are almost always polarized. As long as the cap you're replacing is also polarized you can use an electrolytic. However, electrolytics have high ESR, so it will be like putting in both a cap and a resistor. They also have high self-inductance, so the frequency response can do interesting things, especially at higher frequencies.

So, if you don't know what you're doing, it's probably best to go with whatever the designer put in in the first place. If you know a little, you might substitute types with similar characteristics. If you really know what you're doing, you might go wild, and change the characteristics of the circuit by quite a bit. Who knows? It might even make it better!

What the two gurus said above

But only for Audio frequencies !!!

At RF, the material / construction of the cap is also important.

And I didn't want to get into memory, tempco and all those other fun little details.

Personally I am against tantalum, electrolytics are good enough now.

Correct. I was assuming audio frequencies, considering where we are. I hadn't considered digital circuits, though.

Here's an explanation of electronics...

http://www.allworldknowledge.com/electricity/index.html

:D -Jack

I can't believe I had so much wrong!

Originally posted by AMZ-FX Here's an explanation of electronics... http://www.allworldknowledge.com/electricity/index.html :D -Jack

heh thanks. i knew that much. i guess my question was specifically how do different capacitor materials effect tone. and will one material differ from another in such a way that is drastically unusable.

Well, that's a different question.

It will depend on the circuit, to a very large degree.

This might give you a few ideas:

http://sound.westhost.com/articles/capacitors.htm