Blind phono stage & amp; Capacitor testing
Hi all,
We've managed to do a bit of a blind listening testing today. We had the Nighthawk F117, FB modded Tron, FB-OTP MKI & FB-OTP MKII prototype.
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Well, it was a very interesting result. The FB-OTP MKII landed in fourth place. Tron and the Nighthawk were inseparable to my ears both units sounded fabulously rich and had extremely low background noise. The MKI FB-OTP was my favorite. So, after a bit of a discussion as to why the OTP MKII failed to podium, some mods were made. (Alan may elaborate here if he wishes)
What resulted was a much cleaner sounding unit. It was very precise sounding but it still had "noise" which Alan and i agreed was down to the Opamps in the unit. Luckily i'm waiting for these to arrive: http://sparkoslabs.com/product/discrete-op-amp-ss3602/ (any user opinions are welcome). There is also another Opamp on the way to test so stay tuned for more info on that.
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Now, over the last week or two i've been blindly testing the Caps in the MKI to find the upgrade to fit in the MKII. Again a pair of 0.72p Caps outperformed some Mundorf ZNs which was a real surprise, thankfully, there were another set of great sounding Caps which are now being testing against stiffer competition.
More to follow!