Lon
Seasoned Member
  

"Love without guts is worthless!" Philip K. D*ck
Posts: 13827
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Well, it's been a week now with the Taboo Mk IV in the house, on and receiving signal about fifteen hours a day, off nine hours over night on average. Certainly past the initial break in and starting on seasoning with use.
It sounded great out of the box and even better now. I've rolled some tubes over the week and right now I have three Amperex for RCA ECC189 tubes in the CSP3 with a bottle-shaped RCA 5Y3 rectifier feeding the Taboo, the same rectifier and input tube now in the Taboo Mk IV and Svetlana SV83 power tubes in the Taboo. This has been the best complements so far. (I am mainly feeding the CSP2+ from the PS Audio DirectStream DAC with VooDoo Cable Stradivarius Cremona interconnects before and after the CSP2+, all power cabling is PS Audio PerfectWave AC-12 and all the components sit on PS Audio PowerBases and on VooDoo Cable IsoPods.)
I love my Taboo Mk III and it is the heartbeat of a second system I have so far been able to keep upstairs to use with a Denon universal player, a ZBIT and small bookshelf speakers from Peachtree Audio, though I'll most likely be listening to headphones up there most often. But this Taboo Mk IV IS the better amp. I'm very impressed with the copper-foil Type 2 Jupiter caps and the UFO transformers. There's a clarity and vividness to the sound that is a step up from the MK iii as well as a deeper and wider level of dynamic changes. And yet I would not call the sound clinical or etched ever unless the recording itself has those characteristics. Most of the time what I am listening to or watching envelopes my thoughts and I forget I have headphones on, don't think of audio matters at all--a VERY GOOD THING.
I can hear every change I make in the signal path with this amp: different sources and cabling, different settings on my P10, different isolation set-ups. . . .
This one is not going to be returned, this Taboo is going to be in my system from now forward. I can recommend this amp heartily for planar magnetic headphones (I don't have any dynamic headphones here to sample).
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« Last Edit: 07/19/17 at 13:24:52 by Lon »
HR-1,ZP3,ZTPRE,ZBIT,ZROCK2,SE84UFO3-25, Taboo MkIV;PS Audio: Soloist SE, DMP+DSD, P10, PowerBases, XStream Statemt spk cb, AC-12 power cds; Mapleshade:SamsonV2+V3; Oppo UDP-205;VooDoo Cremona +Amati,Iso-Pods;MD90-T SE tuner; headphones: Oppo PM-1,Audeze LCD-2
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