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elna cap colors

morseguy

morseguy

Active Member
My old Kenwood ka6100 amp has the following 'lytic elna cap colors.
Power supply - black, the rest, most are dark blue, some grey, and few light orange.
I can't find much information on them. Anybody know what these elna cap colors from the 1970's indicate?
 
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That's a tough one in my experience. If you can find a type designation on the cap, you *might* be able to look it up on the Elna website. Some of the capacitor companies have a cross-reference sheet of obsolete types, you have to dig around a bit. The type designation will usually be a one, two, or three letter code printed on the cap. My experience is limited to trying to find this information on a bunch of caps out of a '70s Teac tape deck. I had very limited success. I ended up just buying the Elna Silmic IIs for everything from DigiKey, except for a very few where there was nothing close in value.
 
The Orange ones maybe Low leakage check to see if it has a code with NR or NL or LN post a code from the orange one.

The others can be replaced with a good quality cap Panasonic Nichion or Elna
 
A friend of mine was recapping an old Pioneer integrated. A very nice one, I believe an SA-9800. He is very meticulous and wanted to be very careful in his choice of caps in the tone circuit. He noticed that the caps in that circuit that were in the signal path were the orange ones. Since then I have assumed that the orange ones must have a superior sonic property. Maybe they are lower ESR.

Under current circumstances, I can't see how you could do wrong with Elna Silmics as a replacement for the orange Elnas on the old receivers. On the other hand, I don't see any reason to waste Elna Silmics on the power supply. I use Panasonic FC and FM. Probably all of these are superior to the original Elnas in their various placements.

What I like about the Silmics is that they seem to take a little of the edge off of those old receivers. Especially when you hook up a CD player to them. It's nice that Digikey now appears to offer the full line up at reasonable prices.
 
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Well that one of the problems, trying to get all the caps you need in one brand from one supplier. I usually use Mouser which is what I just did. I was easier for me to go with Nichicon Muse series as some caps, no matter what brand are on back orders.
Anyway I got every "lytic cap I needed, most are FG's, then KW's and the last few FW's, but at least none are back ordered and they are all from the same company. I don't have alot of time to devote to searching around and ordering a few here and a few there.
I mean come-on, realistically a complete set of what I just ordered has to be AT THE LEAST as good as whats in there. From my point of view the first purpose of recapping is for reliability and safety.
 
Well, I tried to analyse the same orange/grey Elna question because I'm preparing the complete revamp of a 1972 kenwood KA-2002A that I happily own for 10 years now, but the sound is getting blurry. As a sort of back-up, I purchased a second one some weeks ago (because it was for sale for the right price and they are rarely on sale), and I also bought their 1970-1972 predecessor KA-2002.

Please do read through the end, concerning chemicals inside the grey ones.

First surprise: my old KA-2002A has orange and light grey Elna's (the power supply cap is also grey). However, the recently bought KA-2002A and older KA-2002 have only light grey caps (which may drive your conclusion already), see pics attached.

Ok, I thought, serious investigation required, let's list which function each cap has in the orange/grey cap case. Two findings which don't make sense compared to each other:
1) The orange ones and grey ones have no "limited" or "special" application: each color is used for any function (signal path, rail decoupling, emitter decoupling, etc).
2) Funny enough, the colours are consistant in each channel, which would make one believe that the color does matter, but as said: both colors are equally used in any application.

Another surprising finding: the power supply filter cap (2200uF/50V):
- in one of the 1972 KA-2002A and in the 1970 KA-2002: both grey and big : 36 diam x 52 high
- in another 1972 KA-2002A: same CV value, but half the size !
In all cases they are original parts, because they have a clamp fixed on the chassis and soldering is untouched

Further investigation learned that both colors are used in same values (e.g. 10uF/25V) and have identical dimensions.

The printing is also identical, accept for one detail: the grey ones have printed on them "CE(W)". Then, some weeks ago I was looking for info on this code on the web when I stumbled on...... a document from the Australian Environmental Authorities listing all caps which have been identifed containing PCBs.... ooops, carefull with these babies when removing and notably when leaking. Wash your hands well..... and deposit them as one should...... This is by the way confirmed by Elna on their website, which also says (if I remember well) that all caps made after 1972 do not contain PCBs anymore.

Et voila, this could be the explanation: Elna ended the production of the grey caps around the time my amps were built, being replaced by the orange caps to make the distinction they did not contain PCBs anymore; of course the old stocks take a couple of years to disappear in electronics being manufactured around that date.

my personal view if you want to maintain the initial design of the amp:
- use Elna to replace Elna if you want to maintain vintage state
- the power supply buffer cap will be replaced by the Elna Tonerex series (LAO, LPO, labellad "Elna for Audio" specially build for this purpose), but the overall dimension for same value have significantly improved, hence my old 2200uF/50V is replaced by 6800uF/63V with the same dimension (on ebay you find any size/model)
- the signal path: most folks recommend Elna Cerafine (ROA) above Elna Silmic II
- all other applications: Elna Silmic II (RFS) or Silmic (RFO)

Funny enough, the cap dimensions have not changed over 30 years when you use the RFS series !

See attached Elna datasheets: Elna states that RFS is higher grade than RFO. Some folks in some threads claim that the Cerafines have more pleasent sound than RFS, and some quick failures were reported for RFO

If you don't care about vintage state, the panasonic FC and FM ain't bad....but in vintage restoration other parts can play a hugh role: the bias pots, and notably replacing the matched pair transistors for the differential amp part (feedback circuit) to surpress the dc offset building up gradually over the years, therefore directly "biasing" your speakers.

The Nichicon KG Super Through series are a decent alternative for the power supply filter caps (snap-in and solder lugs). Talking about snap-in filter caps: this is a (minor) problem: the lead pitch has been reduced, no way of finding snap-in caps for a 70's amp having the 70's lead pitch.

Ebay shops are my favourite place to shop for ELna's, but for the power supply filter caps I check the manufacturing date first; they are often more then 5 years old already. Nothing wrong with Honk Kong ebay shops either, some good experiences.

Ozzy
 
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I recently recapped an old quad, Panasonic and Nichion in the power filtering, and ther rest was Elna Cerafine and Silmic. Elna make good caps, the thing came alive after I replaced those caps. Pretty much all my caps I baught came from Thailand, and with the caps I always received a little bag with two 0.1uF WIMA Film caps with 'Gift' written on it. A useful gift at that.
 
I just received the Kt-6500 tuner which is from the same time period as the Ka-6100 and oddly enough it has Rubycon lytics in it?
 
Perhaps tuners were build in another factory. Also, at that time, the PCBs were often made by others and only the final product was assembled by Kenwood. For example, you may find the Elna logo on the PCBs of several amp manufacturers.
 
Bigger is not always better, I would always stick with the original uF and V. Else parts down the line in the power supply will be stressed and may break. Diodes and rectifiers, etc.
 
ev13wt said:
Bigger is not always better, I would always stick with the original uF and V. Else parts down the line in the power supply will be stressed and may break. Diodes and rectifiers, etc.
Click to expand...

Very true, when you decide to increase the power supply caps, make sure that the rectifying diodes can handle the inrush current. And bigger isn't better; I decided to purchase a larger power supply cap only after I did some positive testing with some spare caps in parallel, because I wanted to maintain the original can size (and a single 2200 uF for a 2x16W amp isn't large.....). Again, the can size has been reduced 3 or 4 fold over the last 30 years. In my KA-2002A case it turned out very well, but in my class-A headphone amp it proved that there is an optimum value (being much smaller then you would expect it to be), after that larger values directly detoriated the sound, like some circuit resonance started to occur.
 
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morseguy said:
I just received the Kt-6500 tuner which is from the same time period as the Ka-6100 and oddly enough it has Rubycon lytics in it?
Click to expand...

My late-70s Kenwood has all Rubycon as well. I'm getting the impression Kenwood didn't really standardize on parts and used whatever they could stock at the time. Makes sense from a business perspective, at any rate.
 
Here is pics of the caps that came o/o the ka6100, I used macro so someone might be able to decipher the numbers.

Well these are samples, I should have said. The ones on the left are a mixture, but mostly the blue ones.
The big one on the right is one of four for the pwr supply filters.
 

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If I were you, and was concerned with matching the caps as nearly as possible, I'd probably either poke around Elna's website for a old to new sub list, or just call their tech line and ask.
 
Well I'm not that concerned. I started this post at begining of my rebuild. I was just curious what the different colors and numbers of those caps meant in the late 70's.
 
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