Tekton Double Impacts

Dave - Excellent review! Very well written and clear. I already knew the Double Impacts (SE) are excellent so the message it conveyed most to me is how much the speakers can scale up and down based on the equipment they are used with.

You inserted a $3,000 Synergistic Research Galileo UEF USB cable and heard "...heft and meat to the lower frequencies that I had felt to be absent before the change. It was as if the SEs instantly gained another octave in the low bass, providing a much more robust foundation for the rest of the frequency range."  Wow!  I haven't had that kind of change with different cables but it shows how capable this speaker design by Eric really is! 

On the heels of the two most recent posts to this now legendary thread.

The last time I contributed to this post I was a couple of days away from delivery of my DI's. At that time my set consisted of a pair of MCIntosh MC 601', a Mac C2300 preamp and a pair of Focal Sopra 2's. I had long been a, "Mac Guy" but while doing some auditioning prior to the purchase of the Sopra's, I had a chance to listen to many other gear builders best work. Once the DI's were wired into the set up, I knew immediately that the Sopra's were going to be sold...they were that good at a fraction of what I had recently paid for the Focal's. 

After letting the DI's break in for a few weeks, I knew next that the Mac gear was soon to follow in the path of the Sopra's. Enter a pair of Pass Labs XA 60.8's and the XP 20 line stage. However now I needed a phono preamp, as the Mac 2300 was pretty versatile in that it had a better than average phono stage. Impressed by all the accolades many  on this thread were saying about Aric Kimball of Aric Audio that I reached out to Aric and picked up one of his MM preamps. Upon plugging it it and wiring it up, I was blown away with the sound that was coming from my turntable compared to the Mac!  Richness, detail, dimensionality, it was there in spades. However I was becoming less than impressed with the Pass XP-20 line stage. It was anemic compared to my neighbors Audio Research Reference 5 that I plugged in as reference. 

At this time I realized that I needed to go back to a tube preamp to get the sound that I desired and that fit my listening room best. Tube Research Labs, The Dude came up and was highly regarded by our very own Grannyring as being the best sounding preamp he has heard at any price point. Now I had to have one, but quickly learned that the company had folded after the founder's recent passing and finding one on the used market was going to be a test of my patience, which is in very short supply. I reached back to Aric and mentioned how much I loved his phono preamp and could he build me something that resembled The Dude in terms of its overbuilt everything and use of the best components available. He said that he would be more than happy to work with me on this, "cost no object" piece, but he would also send me one of his current preamps to listen to in the meantime and to use as a base point. Once I received and plugged it into the system and fed those fantastic XA 60.8's, the XP-20 was for sale. The synergy that I was hoping to gain by having two pieces of Pass gear was not there, but  Aric's preamp was sonic bliss! 

Fast forward to today and Aric has completed the preamp and is now letting it break in to fine tune the finished product. I am going to let Aric provide the details of the build and to field any questions, but excitedly he states that it is one of the best pieces of gear to come off his bench. Aric has been great to work with and is treasure in our little esoteric audio community! Those of you who are familiar with Aric and his fine products know very well what I am speaking of, and for those of you who are continuously, "chasing the audio dragon", you owe it to yourself to reach out to Aric! 

Oh, and by the way...The other Eric (who's masterful works we sing of), Tekton DI's continued to impress me and all those who are privy to my listening room to the extent that I have ordered the SE's and they are in the production queue!

Cheers and happy listening!

Brian

Tom, Charles, and Scott (sbayne),

Thanks so much for the positive feedback. I simply wrote what I heard and tried to keep it real.

Scott, I can tell you that I was more than a little hesitant to invest so much in a USB cable, but it brought such a profound improvement in sound quality to my digital front end (and to David’s) that I honestly don’t regret it for a second. Your inference that David’s system and the SEs in particular are able to fully flesh out and capitalize on such differences in cabling is spot on and I am glad that this came through in my writing.

Often the downside to that level of resolution is that such gear is less forgiving and I would be negligent not to state that I predict the SEs to be more demanding of upstream gear-and-cabling quality than the base DIs, which seem from all I have heard and read to be almost magical in their affability toward varying levels of upstream components/cabling. Perhaps David will weigh in on that, having now owned both speakers.

Thanks again guys,
Dave

$3k usb cables?  Give me break!  Okay now you've totally devolved this thread into hyperbole and confirmation bias ridden ridiculousness.