Monday, September 21, 2015

"Tengu"- extreme MC phono stage



















After building the Boozhound Labs MM and dedicated MC stage featuring the Russian PIO caps, I was inspired to build an extreme version of the MC stage. I was very impressed with the performance of the MC stage built from a kit. Having at hand some ultra expensive Audio Note (AN) caps, I thought what better use.

The AN are silver foil and clad in a pure copper outer. The leads are fine silver wire and the caps currently sell for AU$427 each! To further ensure this was going to be a "killer" build I added Vishay resistor, Nichion electrolytic caps, solid copper high-end RCAs and a Hammond enclosure. All hook-up wire is silver plated fine copper and solder is WBT silver solder. The sliding lid is lined with bitumanised heavy Al foil to control resonance and vibration.

Construction is on Veri-board, there is a battery test point at the front and a soft blue "ON" led. On an initial listen the bottom end appears a little richer and the sound stage more defined. But early days. The cost of parts is over AU$1000! "Tengu" are Japanese mystical creatures let's hope this has a mystical sound to compliment the price.