> Filter capacitors have a half life of about 20 years.
> What that means is that in a 20 year period, about
> half of the caps will have failed. This is true of
> transistor and tube amps.
Ralph, I would call this MTBF, or mean time between failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annualized_failure_rate
"A vendor-quoted MTBF implies that half the drives in a large population will fail within that time of operation."
If in technical school they used half life, I would suggest they either got the term wrong or the definition has now evolved into its current usage as "the period of time it takes for the amount of a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half."
> What that means is that in a 20 year period, about
> half of the caps will have failed. This is true of
> transistor and tube amps.
Ralph, I would call this MTBF, or mean time between failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annualized_failure_rate
"A vendor-quoted MTBF implies that half the drives in a large population will fail within that time of operation."
If in technical school they used half life, I would suggest they either got the term wrong or the definition has now evolved into its current usage as "the period of time it takes for the amount of a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half."