@prof My pleasure. I *am* doing this mostly for selfish reasons (I want to have killer speakers at a price I can afford). But am glad to help Tom Thiel and Rob Gillum develop an upgrade that will benefit many more.
I'm pretty excited about it and think the "final" product will be a substantial improvement for our already excellent speakers. Tom continues to refine the parts list. One of the last pieces of the puzzle regards the paired 100 uF caps that are common in many models. Jim Thiel chose electrolytics for these because film caps in this value are quite bulky and *very* expensive. Also, to his ears these were less important sonically (they are in the shunt position so do not directly carry the signal). Others disagree, however, so we're going to compare a couple of film cap choices as replacements. One is a custom cap from Clarity so it will probably be at least another month before Tom can begin his evaluation.
I'm pretty excited about it and think the "final" product will be a substantial improvement for our already excellent speakers. Tom continues to refine the parts list. One of the last pieces of the puzzle regards the paired 100 uF caps that are common in many models. Jim Thiel chose electrolytics for these because film caps in this value are quite bulky and *very* expensive. Also, to his ears these were less important sonically (they are in the shunt position so do not directly carry the signal). Others disagree, however, so we're going to compare a couple of film cap choices as replacements. One is a custom cap from Clarity so it will probably be at least another month before Tom can begin his evaluation.