AN Niobium versus Tantalum resistors?

Should have mentioned the Takman CF replaced generic metal oxides.

So, more to the story :

I tried both Takman carbon and metal - also replacing generic metal. The carbon were super awesome for low end weight and realism, but they no doubt have a compressor effect (in pro-audio lingo) or smoothness (in hi-fi lingo). They just had weird, softness issues. They were also notably less transparent and higher noise than the Takman metal. They gave me the musical information, but with less clarity. I burn-in several hundred hours with my testing.

I tried to run Takman metal on the + and carbon on the -. Worked very well at first, then I felt fatigue after a couple weeks, like something wasn’t quite right. It was like parallel compressing lol.

So I returned the Takman metal and the overall coherency is back, but I’m jonesing for the best of all worlds. Willing to pay the price for AN Niobium.. their Kaisei have had no downside for me when it comes to low noise and transparency. Considering Takman carbon are like 10+ years old design (?), and Niobium is from last year...I have to imagine there are advances.

If you sign up for the SHF forums you could ask the question there you would likely get some good responses. And I would say give the AN resistors a shot they do make excellent sounding parts.

Hey clustrocasual I really appreciate your resistor comparison and thoughts on the Takman. If you do get a chance to use AN Niobium don't hesitate to update us here.

I am about to do a resistor upgrade in my already modded amp and there seems to be no consensus on what to use, unlike say with power supply caps.

listen for yourself, and don‘t buy into the boutiques sound better everywhere trap. Work out where you need to spend the money