Quote:Regarding your comment about Miflex capacitors, I just need some clarification. While it's been a while, my recollection was that Steve was experiencing significant quality issues with Jupiter caps which were widely used throughout Decware amps up until 2021?22?. I believe he looked into options with Mundorf given their high SQ, but did not believe production capacity would be sufficient.
Last I recall Steve opted to use the Miflex capacitors. I haven't heard/read anything on this or other forums that Miflex SA (Poland) has closed or gone out of business. Is this something very recent?
HK
Yes, when Covid hit, Jupiter had both logistics issues and reliability issues so we pulled them from all our amps that were still here and switched to Mundorf. We purchased all of the Mundorf caps in North America and when we tried to re-order Mundorf said they weren't going to make them anymore. It turns out that Mundorf never made their own caps in the first place. They were contracted out. They left us hanging, just like Jupiter. We then moved to Miflex and purchased the bulk of North Americas inventory and now after 80 years they have closed too.
Sadly this is what happened and it left us hanging once again. We purchased everything we could of the values we use and set off on the mission to find another replacement.
This is as close as I have come to purchasing the winding machines needed to make our own caps. You can see it now, Decware caps, be all the rage, good for business. However it is not realistic, and with 2500 amps on order it would just slow down production, or raise the prices on everything to cover the building and new employee(s) to make the caps.
And it is fantasy to think that someone can go out and buy some winding machines and train a couple people to make caps and expect them to be better than other caps on the market that are made by large companies. We don't need any reliability issues that can come from lack of experience.
The truth is, the axial lead cap manufacturing companies, like Miflex, are going out of business because all caps today are radial, and surface mount. Kind of like what happened to CRTs used in old televisions and computer monitors. Those companies are gone. Times change.
Needless to say, this also wouldn't have been a problem before Covid because we didn't use enough caps to put much of a dent in things. Now we buy 24 times more caps than before Covid which is way more than distributors of boutique caps can stock.
In choosing replacement caps I made the decision to go with three of the largest manufactures around to hopefully be the last time changing caps for awhile and then spent quite a bit of time listening to various options until I found what I like. For film caps we are using both Illinois Capacitor and Vishay depending on the values, and for foil caps we are using Cornell Dubilier. The foil caps are what will be replacing the Miflex, which were also foil. The Cornell are made from aluminum, similar to the original VCAPs that we used to offer. They do not have the stupidly large size or horrific break-in period and the sound is more forgiving and silky like the caps used in the original Zen amps but with far more resolution.
Right now the only amplifiers being built with MIFLEX are the SE84UFO25 and the SEWE300B. We had enough of those values in stock to last aprox 2 years. Everything else is being built with the new Cornell Dubilier foil caps and those units will be also once the Miflex are gone.
Steve
Pages: 1
Accelerated Waiting List delays (Read 394 times)
