I'm going to suggest something. Whenever you look at a particular capacitor in a circuit, there's two different classes you can mostly put them in:
Bulk: Times when you need a metric truckload of capacitance, because you ideally want to hold the voltage across the cap dead-steady:
- Power supply filtering, decoupling
- AC signal coupling/DC blocking
In these situations, you need the huge capacitance because you can't just choose to make your ICs consume smaller pulses of current; and it's difficult and annoying to make the input stage of your amp have an impedance of Gigohms. Much easier to just use a huge bucketload of capacitance, without being too fussed about the precise value.
Ideal solutions: tantalum/electrolytic/class 2 ceramic.
Precise: Times when you need a precise, stable, predictable capacitance, but you typically don't need huge values because you control the currents that'll charge/discharge the cap. In these situations, you expect and rely on the voltage across the capacitor actually changing:
- Timing
- RC/RL/RLC lowpass/highpass/bandpass etc
In these situations, you can get away with smaller capacitances because you can increase the R's and the L's in your circuit to compensate for smaller C's (up to a point).
Ideal solutions: film/all those other low-capacitance types/class 1 ceramic.
Class 1 ceramics don't go up to nearly the same capacitance values as class 2, but that's fine, because whenever you need class 1, you can design your circuit to use those smaller values.</wild generalisation>
So as an example, a single-supply (the fact that it's single supply is of no relevance, actually) audio bandpass filtering circuit might consist of input and output buffers with class 2 capacitors interfacing to the outside world. But the internal bandpass caps should probably be class 1. Just a silly little example, but I think this sort of explains why I'm fascinated, but not the least bit worried, about this DC bias effect. None of my previous designs are adversely affected by the DC bias effect, because all of the critical, precise capacitors I had just happened to be small values, and I happened to end up with C0G/NP0 for those, even though I was completely clueless about this effect.