[HalidePisces]

Recently, ASRock introduced something called "A-Style Purity Sound" in their upcoming offerings of computer motherboards. I'm not in the market for a new motherboard, but one of the interesting things mentioned in it is the lack of capacitors. I've seen many threads on Head-Fi about capacitors (remember BlackGate?) affecting or not affecting sound. I haven't run into any threads here about not using any capacitors. So... technically speaking, would a setup eschewing capacitors fare differently?

Site for those curious:
http://www.asrock.com/microsite/Intel8

 

[xnor]

See capacitive coupling (in headphone amps).

 

[jaddie]

The odd thing about the ASRock Purity Sound idea...they claim no caps, but there are 9 in the photo...perhaps not in the audio path, but for a "capless" circuit it still rolls of .5dB @ 20Hz.  How do you even do that without a cap in the circuit????  Pretty much has to be here somewhere.
 
And, that wonderful diff amp?  Those chips were designed in the late 1970s, it's a dual internally comped NE5534.  Big deal.  Pretty garden-variety today.  
 
Not to say it's not an improvement over something, but a true cap-less, direct-coupled thingy would have response down to DC, or at least some low limit of the offset comp servo, and there's no reason not to make that pole somewhere sub-audible.

 

[jaddie]

One more thing, capacitors are not always distortion generators.  It's just a question of proper application.  There are dielectrics that are just fine for audio, completely distortion-less, and there are others than are not good, but can also be distortion-less if used in a properly designed circuit.   Most capacitor-related distortion occurs when the wrong type of cap is operated in a circuit where it becomes an element in a filter, or it is operated beyond rated voltages or voltage polarities.  Bad engineering sort of gave caps a bad name.