@jetter thanks and I wasn’t aware you could actually use the Diablo as a power amplifier. But my thought of buying a Mola Mola Makua preamp and using the Diablo 300 as a pure power amp was more of a fantastical musing after being so impressed by Mola Mola’s Tambaqui.
@arafiq yes you were right. I really didn’t know what to expect with the Tambaqui, despite its price tag. I’ve seen in other posts that a few can find this DAC to be lean and analytical. While I certainly don’t like lean and analytical and at times have struggled with that side of things in prior iterations of my system, that is not in the slightest what I get with the Tambaqui. Maybe I did detect a bit of that on the first day, but after settling in it became lush and inviting. Obviously system synergy is playing a major role. But I think I “won the lottery” from the perspective of system matching. I feel like the trio of the PhoenixNET, Diablo and Tambaqui (and yes, Innuos Zenith and PhoenixUSB too) are so unbelievably dialled into the precise sound that I’ve been chasing all these years. Total spacial precision and clarity but solid, tangible, rhythmic, propulsive, muscular, fast yet totally unforced, the best dynamics I’ve heard on my system, all while having an incredible smooth flow of music. And a word I don’t often see in reviews: pretty. Can’t put my finger on it but some music just sounds pretty to me, for the first time. The bass has become stronger and even more resolute over the past two days. That’s a good subjective word for how I would describe the sound - resolute. I lot of this I was unknowingly searching for in my random testing of stuff. Blind squirrel found a nut.
Last year I made a TON of upgrades after selling my car to fund everything, and while performance when through the roof I think I felt that ever elusive musical engagement was still lacking. The Tambaqui has utterly closed this gap in my system.
I’ve had long term plans to eventually add a turntable to my system (my Diablo has a phono card) but I now feel like I will be disappointed on that front if I don’t spend an unreasonable amount to get to the level of performance and musical engagement I’m getting now, and the chances I will get there with the right voicing for me seems slim…. This sound is not just good (it is), but more importantly I just can’t get over how it simply ticks all my boxes for my personal tastes so perfectly.
Of course there are even higher end DAC’s which I was curious about (CH Precision aNR EMM Labs DA1) but I’m not so keen to even look at these anymore.
The one thing that I’ll repeat as a ding against the Tambaqui is it seems to have slightly less breath, air and space between everything, and maybe some other DACs might present a bigger, grander and richer sound than the Tambaqui’s more focused approach. But its resolute solidity and precision while still being utterly revealing is well worth the trade off for me, as I get more musical enjoyment at the slight expense of HiFi spatial pyrotechnics and overall scale, which possibly, for me, may even be attributes that get in the way of the music to some extent..
I spent last night playing all sorts of albums I love that for decades have sounded like crap on my system, being thin/harsh or bad recordings. For the first time every single one of them sounded great on my system with the full extent of the musical content clearly coming through without any unpleasant aspects. My system became more revealing AND harsh recordings have become highly enjoyable. So cool!
Update: Just remembered my criticism of the lack of space and air may be entirely related to the $300 AQ Red River balanced interconnects I’m using, which I’ve read are decent but known to clobber spatial distances. So the Shunyata cables should help with this when they arrive, as should the MU1’s 4X oversampling. But really, I’m not feeling I’m missing anything at all right now. Pretty sure I’ve never felt that way about my system before, ever, in the decades I’ve been at it.
