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.
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.
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!
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