Cyril’s capacitor article series in Electronics World, a few decades ago, were a landmark in our understanding of the mechanisms behind capacitor dielectric absorption and distortion. Now, Cyril updates this source of information taking into account both new insights and new wound and stacked capacitor products. The article contains numerous graphs of measurements on a large set of capacitors of different material, construction and values, taken with the special purpose test equipment developed by Bateman. In many cases, results are unexpected and run counter to common knowledge. And of course a polarized capacitor is NOT the same as a polarized dielectric. This is another article which will help designers towards better performing audio circuits.
