Thiel Owners

Thanks! much- beetlemania
maybe I can find an AX-5 near my locale for an audition?
Happy Listening!

An amp with zero loop feedback must be extraordinarily well designed to work for music. Feedback disturbs phase response. Ayre is addressing design from first principles and I would expect all their products to be very clean, especially in the transient-temporal domain. If it sounds clean it is clean.  But, the joys of power should not be underestimated.

I hot-rodded my 1990 Classé DR-9, considered a high voltage / high current amp. In stereo it produces100 wpc > 8 ohms, 200 > 4 and 400 > 2 ohms. Nice muscle and finesse. Strapped to mono it gives 400 wpc > 8 ohms, 800 > 4 and 1100 > 2, which means the power supply runs out of current before voltage. I use them in my studio where they are surprisingly cleaner strapped than in stereo at moderate levels into a moderate sized hard-to-measure space described earlier. Anyhow, I would have thought that the 400 > 2 ohms in stereo would have been plenty, freeing the other amp for other duties. But the improvement was dramatic enough to assign both amps to mono duties.

The current behavior of your Ayre is of interest. But, more power produces an effortless transient attack that really makes music work emotionally.

According to the article cited by beetlemania -
JA measured 220w clipping into (2) Ohms w/ one channel driven.
tomthiel -

Thoughts?
Happy Listening!

The current behavior of your Ayre is of interest. But, more power produces an effortless transient attack that really makes music work emotionally.

To the best of my knowledge, Ayre, Theta and, maybe Dartzeel are the only manufacturers of SS zero-feedback amps. The Ayre VX-5 stereo amp has a bit more power than my AX-5 integrated (rated at 300 W into 4 Ohm). Stereophile measured the MX-R (non Twenty version) at 595 W into 4 Ohms and 720 W into 2 Ohms - but that product is WAY beyond my budget. The Theta Citadel ($12K) is rated at 400 W into 8 Ohm and 800 into 2 Ohms. The Dartzeels are generally more expensive than Ayre or Theta and also less powerful other than the $150K behemoth reviewed by Fremer (1025 W into 2 Ohms!). I wonder how *that* would sound driving a modded pair of CS3.7s! 

I think there are a handful of tubed zero feedback designs but these are probably less powerful than the above. And with that I apologize for taking the "Thiel owners thread" off topic!

In my opinion amplification and all other elements of the chain are very germane. Thiel speakers reveal upstream misbehavior extremely "well". This battle never ends because only by ultra-resolution can we retrieve the inner detail of music.