Pale Rider
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Some of you know that I have donated my Taboo MkII to a worthy vet, so I can't A/B the II and the III. But I can compare the new Taboo with a righteous competitor, the Cavalli Liquid Fire. The LF is an excellent amp, likewise designed for and voiced with the LCD-2. I have owned it for a couple of years and use it in my office rig, the Taboo doing double duty at home as a backup to one of my Toriis and as a headphone amp. I had always missed Lucid Mode when listening to the Cavalli, but tonally and for dynamics, it is stellar. At its price point, and as a pure headphone hybrid amp, it should be.
Twenty-four hours in with the Taboo, one of these lovely amps is going to be finding a new home, and it is not the Taboo. With stock tubes, this amp is simply amazing, and I know from significant Decware experience, it has not even begun to break in yet. At the office, the rig is optimized Mac mini [2012 w/ 16gb RAM], external USB 7200rpm 2tb hard drive, Audirvana+, Mytek 192 DSD DAC and the Taboo. Redbook sounds great with both amps, but cue up some of the Blue Coast and Channel DSD recordings, and the combo of the Taboo and the LCd-2 is simply sublime. I am hearing things on Emily Palen's Creation and Live at Grace Cathedral I just have not heard before. The DSD files off the Allman Brothers Fillmore East SACD-SHM actually suggest there is a good recording there of a fabulous concert [or two].And the Dire Straits Brothers in Arms SACD is killer. Can't wait to try some of my reference Verdi recordings. The separation of instruments, the levels of detail without etchiness, the sheer realism, is just amazing
Kudos Steve. The Taboo sets a new reference level not just for headphones, but I believe for realistic audio reproduction. I haven't listened to everything, and I am not interested in $70k speakers or Ferrari-priced amps, because I have children who demand some level of subsistence, but this is genuinely "it." To borrow a Deerhunter metaphor, "this is this." Nothing else is this, and this is nothing else, and neither more nor less than what it is.
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