i am currently replacing all the caps on a piece of audio gear in hopes of improving sound preformance. My question is can I use polarized electrolytics in the audio path? Currently there are bi polar electrolytics (cheap Chinese) and I'd like to replace them with better quality Nichicon caps. Nichicon carries the muse series bipolar caps (the green ones) but I've heard of the FW series sounding great.

Don't want to quote others, but disagree completely that caps in signal path of audio devices don't have any influence on sound. I am afraid that you post question on wrong forum, better option is http://www.diyhifi.org or http://www.diyaudio.com or similar.

BTW, I prefer no caps on audio signal path at all, if it is possible.

Luckily, the performance standard for amplifiers now days is very high compared to 20 years ago, so, no matter what determines your criteria, you will probably get a great amp.

I agree that my not-to-old PC is 4 time faster than older one, that I had. Disagree that now days audio products are very high whatever compared to 20 years ago. Try to find original old 16-bit TDA1541A Philips DAC chip on ebay, and if you are very very lucky, it will cost you more than now days 32-bit audio "state-of-art" products. Not to mention AD1865K or PCM63K, same story. Or old Philips CDM swing-arm mechanism.

 

A further consequence of this statement I made in post#18 is that there are places you should not use polarised capacitors.

By this I mean that polarised capacitors need a direct polarising voltage to be supplied as well as the alternating signal voltage.

Those places are where no polarising voltage is available. This was a great problem in past designs before large value non polarised capacitors became available.

josip post#21
BTW, I prefer no caps on audio signal path at all, if it is possible.

If you have electrostatic speakers (capacitive, the best available for many parts of the range) you should be careful what you wish for lest it become true
But it won't matter as you will have no sound since you have already excluded studio grade condenser mikes!