5) Audio recording samples
As already said, the recordings were not made in a studio, so I can not exclude that the recordings are possibly distinguishable by background noise (street noise, children's cough - daughter with cold, TV sound,...) or editing mistakes - if you notice something like that, please report right here in the thread, so that I can possibly exchange the files.
During the recordings the microphone was about 2cm (0.8'') away from the tweeter. The maximum sound pressure at the mic was about 106-123dB. The used mic, an
iSEMcon EMX-7150, shows >143dB 3% THD and around 125dB 0.2% THD.
View attachment 319177 View attachment 319180 Source: Production Partner 6/2012 review
During the ABX test in
foobar I explicitly did not look for possible errors in the recordings, but tried to hear a difference between the capacitors in an "honest way".
Of course, I myself was extremely curious about the results. In particular, how the ancient film capacitors that I myself had bought ten years ago as bagged goods (at that time you could buy a bag of various bipolar film capacitors for a few Euros), would perform.
We expect, after the reviews of the high-end capacitor quoted in the opening post and the strongly presented statements and opinions of individuals in forums and YouTube videos that the difference will be staggering.
Therefore, in an ABX blind test, all ten of ten (10/10) trials should be correctly identified.
In other ABX tests, for example, I had 8/10 correct, but this turned out to be a coincidence after further attempts. Therefore, in order not to commit self-deception it should be 10/10 or two times in a row 9/10 correct answers.
All recordings are in lossless flac audio format.
As attachments you can find
three files starting with file names like
"01-Samples_FC... .zip". These are the files with the "Fast Car" track sample recordings, one file for each capacitor.
In the "
samples_PN.zip" file are the three pink noise recordings for the three capacitors.
My own ABX results look like this:
Alumen-Z-Cap versus Old-Cap for pink noise recording
View attachment 319175
Alumen-Z-Cap versus Standard-Cap for "Fast Car" recording
View attachment 319176
As one can easily see, the different film capacitors were completely transparent and indistinguishable to me. So for me there is no reason to spend fifty times or more the price for high-end capacitors, compared to normal standard film capacitors.