Hello!
I own a beautiful Prophet 5 Rev 3.1 (upgraded to Rev 3.3). It works fine, but after 38 years the electrolytic caps are drying out and the tantalum caps could short circuit any time.
I see a lot of people replacing all the tantalum caps with electrolytics, and I tought it was fine but a very good technician (who helped develop some TC Electronic stuff) told me that if there were tantalums you need to replace with tantalum. That’s because of the lower ESR that tantalums have. As a matter of fact I have a Roland SDE 3000 that was recapped with electrolytic instead of tantalum (as original) on the RAM board and that burnt the two RAM controller chips, put new tantalums back on and it worked flawlessly.
In fact tantalums are more expensive than elecrtolytics, and if Sequential could put more cheap capacitors on the boards they would have done it, instead I think they went for tantalums for a reason.
What do you think? should I just put electrolytics in and don’t worry about that or should I replace as original to be sure not to make any damage?
Thanks !
Have a good day!
We typically replace any tantalum caps ON A POWER SUPPLY with electrolytics, because when a tantalum fails, it shorts out - and a short in the power supply can be devastating. Beyond the power supply, you have to be more careful about replacing one type of cap with another. You can change the character of the sound by using the wrong cap.
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