Thiel Owners

Good to see you again- cd318

So long as you are pleased w/ your gear and musical presentation, mission accomplished.  I can second  Creek gear prior to the Evolution series ( I have not heard those amps).  There is a bit of magic in those integrated amps.  Surprisingly very good and a steal at their price-points for Thiel models CS 2.4 and down.
Happy Listening!

Good to see you- jonandfamily

hope you are well and enjoying music today.
Happy Listening!

So, there I was a week ago awaiting the arrival of my recertified BAT VK300XSE from Colorado...

I got what I feel was a fair enough trade-in on my Simaudio Neo340iDPX2 toward the BAT, $1800 toward the $3100, so all was good there. I didn't want the hassle of selling it privately nor did I want the swing-time between committing to the BAT and getting the offset from the Neo. 

The BAT arrived Saturday of Labor Day weekend - days before it was scheduled. Woohoo. Happy camper. 

I unbox it, wire it up, plug it in and...nuttin'.
It goes into standby/warmup mode, but nothing further. Blank face. Zippo. Nada. Zilch. I check and double check everything.  Same thing. Nuttin'.

I send an email explaining the situation. No response until after the weekend. (Understandable.)  Turns out they're not open weekends, anyway. 

My contact there contacts BAT and they forward a set of re-boot instructions which are included in the original owner's manuals but NOT in their recertified units. I re-unbox the unit, wire it up, plug it in, follow the procedure and...
nuttin'.  Big ol' brick once again.  I re-do everything again. Check everything. ( Not a helluva lot to do so far as hooking up an integrated amplifier, is there?)  Nuttin'. 

Sigh. 

My contact then sends me another email with a shipping label going to BAT directly for the non-working unit. He then immediately ships another recertified VK300XSE to me. 

It arrived today.  It works. I was right about my 3.6's liking a little more power. (300 vs 200 watts @ 4ohms). While the Neo was nothing to sneeze at by any means, the BAT simply "presents" better overall, particularly at the conservative level I find myself listening at 90% of the time. The phono stage in the BAT is also more detailed. Good stuff. 

I'm still finding that adding the REL T7 to my system improves things. I'll be taking it in and out of service to determine how the BAT itself improves upon the Neo, but I can't say at this moment if it warrants removing the REL altogether. I like the way everything is sounding. 

The folks at TMR did everything right addressing my problem with the first unit. I couldn't ask for better - they treated me well. 

Back to digging the hell outta my Thiels...

Anyone visit the current Thiel website lately?

Boy it's depressing.  It looks like a company that is almost gone, like a generic web site selling over the net lifestyle products:

https://www.thielaudio.com/

I went through it wondering "where are the speakers?"  I had to dig down into the menus to finally find just a handful left of the (non-Jim) Thiel speakers now called "Legacy Products" (so selling those last ones off), along with hats and T-shirts.

Man it's just too sad what happened.  It's hard to imagine what the point of calling a company like that "Thiel."  People associated a certain speaker with that name, and they sell nothing like it. so what does the name even get them?

^That is so sad.:-(