Hello fellow TP 2.0 preamp owners. Just a word of advise regarding the V-Cap OIMP capacitors. Several people have e-mailed me regarding interest in this cap to put in the outputs of their preamps. If you have never soldered anything or done any of this type of tinkering with electronics, I highly recommend that you either take your preamp to a local and reputable service tech to put these caps in for you or pay the shipping to have Joseph do it for you. There is very high voltage in the preamp and unless you follow detailed instructions provided by Joseph to perform while installing the caps, you could either injure yourself or do damage to the preamp and/or tubes. I was able to successfully remove the Hovland caps and replace them with the V-caps, but I was very careful in how I did the procedure. It took me about 1 1/2 hours to finish the installation, but only because I took my time, rested in between, and was over-cautious. If I had more experience and wasn't so anal about things, I probably could have done it in half the time. At 9:00 P.M. this evening, MST, I will have 216 hours on these V-caps. My last impression on them was at approx. the 150 hr. mark and at this point I am still, if not more than, enthusiastic about these V-caps. I have read the beta-tester's reports, and some claim that up to 300 hours and even beyond, the sound will continue to improve. The total I paid for the pair of caps from VH Audio was $113.44, which included UPS shipping. This seems a lot for two capacitors, but as this cost was less than what any of my interconnects or power cables cost me, I feel that they were a bargain. Also, cap value for your preamp is different depending on what model of the TP 2.0 you have. Joseph is in Taiwan for business/personal reasons and won't be back home until March 25th, at which time Victor told me that he had something like 15 tuners waiting for him to do his modifications on, so he's going to be a busy man for a while. I expect that on Joseph's return, he will order a few of the V-Caps to do some critical listening for himself. Assuming Joseph gives these caps his blessing, you might want to wait until he gives his opinion. In the meantime, the Hovland caps are extremely musical and make the preamp a joy to listen through. To my ears, however, the V-caps just allow more musical information to pass through to give you an even higher level of listening bliss. Stay tuned for more updates.
P.S. As a side note, Rx8man has come up with a neat little tweak of floating the main circuit board which gives the preamp even better isolation and should improve on the sound. The tweak is very inexpensive, involving four special screws and a couple of special washers and voila, you have a "floating" circuit board. Rx8man has already installed this tweak and he says it makes a nice improvement. I am going to acquire the floating kit and try this tweak out next week. But first, I want to give the V-Caps their full burn-in and final evaluation before I make any other changes. I've learned the hard way to not change horses in the middle of the stream. Happy listening to all !
