Get a proper capacitor brand. I have never heard of Suntan, and it's possible the manufacturing tolerances of the caps aren't precise enough for decent usage.

Get Nichicon, Nippon Chemicon, Rubycon, Panasonic, or Goldstar caps. These are proper branded capacitors, and will help you in this case.

You don't need to worry about the 16v. As long as it's 16v or higher, you're good. So if you can't find 16v caps, use 20, 24, etc, but don't go below.

Also use flux. It's a miracle substance. Other help with general EE work and soldering can be had at the EEVBlog forum (Where I frequent).

I thought so about the quality from these Suntan caps and the 3 of them only cost $1.80 I will source out some better ones from a better place than where I got them from thanks Ampera.

If you are in the US, Mouser and Digikey are good resources.

Do not buy from a Premier Farnell company. They often have bullshit shipping costs, and there are many bad things said about them. This includes places like Newark/Element14.

Suncon are great caps as well. They used to make caps for Sanyo.

Ampera wrote:

If you are in the US, Mouser and Digikey are good resources.

Agreed overall but watch it with Digikey, $5 fee if your order is under their threshold of $25 or $20 (can't remember which). Not a good choice for just a few capacitors, but great otherwise. (This is of course something that would be easy for OP to find out on his own, just pointing it out to potentially save someone a few minutes of time to figure that out.)

Still better than Newark.

What do you guys think of this Nippon Chemicon capacitor Im worried about the +-20% value:

https://www.rockby.com.au/catresultsSql_12.cf … ?Stock_no=41403

and its got a voltage of 25V and its a "electrolythic low esr" is a low esr still good to use, I dont know the brand of the originals as there isnt one on them and I dont know if the originals are low esr.

Caps usually have a very wide tolerance. Most applications aren't very sensitive towards variations in capacitance.

You don't need low ESR caps for this application, although I don't think using them will hurt anything.

Which sound card, can you post picture of it and the caps?

Given the rating and there's only three of them, I suspect two of the caps are the amplified output DC blocking caps and one of them, the blown one, is just a power supply bypass cap, as the others are not connected to power supplies in a way to cause them to explode (or if it was the amplifier output cap that blew, maybe your amplifier chip is broken too).

20% tolerance rating is perfectly normal, don't think about it.

It should not matter if the new caps are Low ESR, but certainly the old ones on a consumer soundcard weren't, and I don't think you would get any kind of improvement by paying more for Low ESR caps used as amp DC blocking caps.
The one that could be a bulk power supply bypass cap would perhaps stabilise ripple voltages more when Low ESR cap is used.
One downside I can think of is that it's always the best cap that stabilises the ripple voltages most, so if there's only one extremely good cap in the system and the rest are 30 years old, I would rather put it on the motherboard than let a single cap on the sound card to stabilise the ripple for whole system. But, I haven't done any measurements about this, I've never had a need to recap a sound card, not even if they are 20-30 years old.

ESR can add nonlinearity into audio signals when used as a coupling/blocking capacitor, and many audiophiles claim that low ESR caps do sound better. I'm actually highly into audio and build my own speakers and amplifiers sometimes, but I haven't done capacitor comparisons and cannot add personal experience into the mix here. I expect that the difference would be very minor at best as long as you are comparing a new standard-ESR cap to a new low-ESR cap - comparing a new low-ESR cap to a 20 year old standard cap would of course be unfair. In any case, using low ESR caps will sound at least as good, and possibly very slightly better than using a standard cap.

Low ESR caps can charge and discharge faster but sound cards don't draw enough current for it to matter. It will not make a difference for the power bypass caps but it will work fine. This is discounting the possibility of the motherboard capacitors being worn, as Jepael said, which is absolutely a problem that you may encounter with old PCs.

Ok guys the card is a "who knows what brand" with an Ess Audiodrive ES1869F chip I have two pics for you but I dont know how to add pics to this forum so I used Photo Bucket:

http://s836.photobucket.com/user/sierragames/ … fl9wjq.jpg.html

http://s836.photobucket.com/user/sierragames/ … cwua7c.jpg.html

The three capacitors I replaced are the three biggest and closest to the audio ports and the pic with the two removed caps are 11mm long and 8mm wide, I have lost the other cap I removed but it was exactly the same as the others. I didnt realy look into the replacement much I called a shop in my state and he told me what he had but if you guys want to recommend a good capacitor to use and where to get them I would rather go that route.

Those appear to be filtering DC for the amplifier chip. Lower ESR caps will have superior ripple suppression, so if it's not a big cost differential I'd go with them.

gdjacobs wrote:

Those appear to be filtering DC for the amplifier chip. Lower ESR caps will have superior ripple suppression, so if it's not a big cost differential I'd go with them.

It's a 2073 amplifier chip by JRC (NJM2073), so only one of them is a power suppy filtering cap, it looks like it's the middle one.
The other two are just the speaker output DC blocking caps.