[Sandy]

The Taurus and HD800 pairing is an excellent one and you should also factor in some good balanced cables to give you the final end game result.

 
 
Hmmm, I notice that most people seem to run the Taurus balanced.
 
A friend of mine just got one of these, and we compare balanced to SE with both his HD800s and my He1000s. Both of us preferred the SE by a huge margin with both cans.
 
The SE had more warmth, had better timing, better flow, and sounded more natural.

 

[PCWar]

Have been using HD800 and the Taurus for 1 year know and feel that know it very good. Using a Norne Draug 2 XLR versus Sennheiser's original SE cable I find the situation quite the opposite. Perhaps is due to the cable but the characteristics of the balanced out vs SE pretty much mimic the experience with other amps with other headphones. Balanced out I notice increased depth and width of the soundstage, a blacker background, increased stereo separation, better bass texture and faster transitions. To me everything feels more natural this way even when feeding the Taurus with a SE signal form my Theta Gen V dac.

 

[thyname]

Sorry to resurrect an old(ish) thread, but has anybody tried these two amps with Utopia?

 

[Marco59]

Uso Toro con Utopia e sono molto soddisfatto. Purtroppo non possiedo il Ragnarok.

 

[Contrails]

2021 resurrection. I have found an used Taurus Mk2 for sale ($800 USD). Still worth it? Headphones are HD660S for now but might venture into some LCD-3/Hifiman Ananda later in the year.

 

[luckybaer]

2021 resurrection. I have found an used Taurus Mk2 for sale ($800 USD). Still worth it? Headphones are HD660S for now but might venture into some LCD-3/Hifiman Ananda later in the year.

Long-time Taurus owner - I love the headamp. Plenty of power for just about any headphone. HD650, Elex, HE-4XX, DT880, K-601 are my headphones. My Taurus is fed by a OG Freya.

 

[Arnold Schwartz]

I can vouch for the taurus with HD800 and LCD3F, it’s a perfect pairing and sounds incredible from the balanced output. I’ve since upgraded to a TT2 which is a whole other story. The Taurus is incredible value on the secondary market, I no longer need mine but hesitant to sell it because finding another solid state amp down the road with the same performance will be substantially more $$$.