[prepress]

OK. Having been inspired by another thread, I've begun playing around with the taps on my MC501s. I use the 4-ohms for mids/highs and the 2-ohms for bass normally, but guys were talking about how using the 8-ohm taps for bass gives a 3dB increase to the bass. Since I'd spent so much time, energy and tubes looking to recapture some of the low-frequency punch I enjoyed with my previous preamp, I thought why not try it?

With the bass on the 8-ohm taps, I listened to only one track before aborting the whole thing. The low frequencies on Fanfare for the Common Man were too aggressive to me, even overwhelming the mids/highs some. So this weekend I tried reversing my usual set-up, with the bass on 4-ohm and mids/highs on 2-ohm, and with a variety of material, though still mostly my usual go-to audition tracks; DVD and Blu-ray were included in this. The weight and impact of the lows was quite satisfactory, an improvement even. But the highs on some material seemed to have a veil over them, a bit less open.

My tentative conclusion is that everything needs to be on the 4-ohm tap for the sound to balance out; my speakers are 6-ohm. So I plan to look into having one pair of my Kimber 12TC re-terminated with spades at the amp end so I can do that. It's not preferred (I like bananas), but it's the only way I can see to resolve the issue. The danger here is I'll be in an audio store, with other stuff to look at and be curious about (especially power cords). I'm hoping the state of my checking account will be a deterrent to anything serious happening. I might also re-visit the 8-ohm taps for low frequencies first, to see if things smooth out; at the end of the first session with the bass on 4 ohms I returned to the first track I used and the lows had calmed down a bit. Maybe things settled in after over an hour of listening? But then, Ron Cornelius warned that if the 501s began to get hot with the 8-ohm taps I should drop back to 4 ohms. That first session wasn't long enough to see if such would happen.

To be continued . . .