My Constantine+ came with mostly Nichicon Muse caps. There were 3 Nichicon fine golds, and two Oscons. The rest were Muse. I think that the Muse caps are what you would consider a "good value". Very nice for the price, but not the cream of the crop. If you are considering replacing them, then you are probably looking to go beyond just a good value.
I replaced
all of my electrolytics with Black Gates, and it is a clear and obvious improvement (
after the three week burn in). Sure, it cost me 160 dollars with shipping, but I was mentally prepared to go beyond a good value. There are other tweaks that cost just as much, but they may not make as much of an improvement. Because of that, I consider the Black Gates worthwhile and still a good value.
There is another very inexpensive tweak that made a big difference with my DAC. It involves the two capacitors that are part of the negative feedback circuit of the op amp. I removed the two 1200pF negative feedback capacitors (Phillips Mial, blue) just to hear why they were there. Noise. So much noise that I could barely hear any music coming through all of it. It seems that the op amp has such a wide bandwidth (55MHz) that it is amplifiying all of the high frequency digital nasties that are going on next to it. This, combined with the incredible amount of gain makes for a noisy mess. (I realize that there are other reasons to have the cap there, like preventing oscillations, impedance stability, etc., but the obvious issue here is noise rejection.)
Anyway, instead of putting the Phillips caps back in, I tried some silver micas there. The closest value I had was 2200pF, so in they went. I noticed that the sound was a little more rolled off in the highs, due to the higher capacitance value. The high end still had that papery dryness. Last friday I received some smaller values of silver mica caps, so I tried the 120pF. Bingo! Highs are much more extended and the papery dryness is greatly diminished. (Also, there is zero noise, so they are doing their job.) This is an incredibly cheap tweak for those that are interested. Here's where I got them :
http://www.hndme.com/productcart/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=25I'm going to experiment with the two negative feedback resisters next week, just to see if I can get a little more dynamic range out of the op amp without driving it into compression. After that, I'm done.
Honest, I'm done . . . . . . .
