Pwinson, didn't realize I was talking with you the other day here is our coaching for you.
You would be silly not to jump on the 9H now during the sale. What you are dealing with is a topic near and dear to our hearts which is product tuning.
No loudspeaker on the market at any price will be perfect to a listener and trying to duplicate the sonic fingerprint of your Thiel is not possible, as they were unique designs the same as a Rockport or a Wilson of a Focal etc and the Personas are superior speakers to your Thiels not to mention that Thiel is out of business it is a great idea to upgrade to a more modern design from a company that is in business.
As I mentioned to you, sold Thiels for three years and personally knew Kathy and Jim.
The people on this forum would have you believe that the "issues" you have with the Personas are due to their frequency abberititions and you have to be stuck with them.
The reality is we too have seen the heaven and hell of this design, the heaven is that the speakers are totally tranparent, fast, articulate and sometimes spooky how real they can sound.
The hell particularly with the 9H is that they can still sound a bit cool and lacking a bit of warmth in the midrange which imparts a slightly sterile quality to the upper midrange, which is what we think you are not liking.
If you contact Fast, or read the threads we participated in in regards to his Kef Ref 5, you will see that we applied a series of fixes to his system which made his Kef Ref 5's come alive.
These included adding footers to the speakers, a change in interconnects, ethernet cable and usb cabling, a change in music server, adding a power conditioner, changing his dac, adding power cables, and finally a room tuning product, along with reposoitioning his loudspeakers.
The end result of all of this in our opinion his newly tweeked up and augmented setup outperformed a local audio retailors $300k plus setup,
Fast's setup had really old 20+ year old ARC gear, and the speaker cables were not changeable as they were run under the floor, the result of adding a better dac, $6k, a new server $3.4k cabling $6k for the interconnects, $700 usb, $210 ethernet cabling, footers $1,200.00 $4k room tuning Stein Harmonizers, $5k power conditioning, and $4k power cords
Yes all of those parts when added up would not be cheapie additions the point of this story is that even with all of these parts added and a retunning of the speakers in the room created a sound which bettered a $300k rig that would still be money well spent to create the sound which in Fasts room was magnificent, and he too was having the buyer's remorse conversation that his speakers werent sounding right or the way he wanted to before we started working with him.
Fast did not get all of the parts we demoed, he did change his cables, and added a server, he has not yet upgraded his dac, nor power system, and has not gotten the footers or Stein products.
The additions that he did do made a huge difference in transforming his sound, we have left it up to him to go as far as he wants to in the way that he wants to go.
There are a few items you can do to add a bit more warmth in the midrange with the Personas, without spending a lot of money:
the Furutech NCF boosters believe it or not added a nice touch of additonal warmth, a change in power cords and the right power conditioner can also help, one of our favorite conditioners is $3k,
Critical Mass footers are amazing a single set applied to the right component can produce some mind blowing improvements, from $1k a set to $2,800.00
the Iso Acoustics footers can be had for $210 dollars per component and can be used under the preamp, dac, and amp for some very audible improvements, not quite as amazing as the Critical Mass devices however, they produce some remarkable results for not much money, lastly the new ARC Genesis program will allow you to alter the low freq curve which will add some additional warmth to the speakers.
A product which is as transparent as the Personas will require you to do a bit of work they are not a drop and plop type of speaker, they will require you to make a series of changes to tune them to suit your taste some of the additions are not expensive.
If you heard our display system you would know just how remarkable the speakers can sound.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Persona dealers
