Got your pm. Recapping won’t add watts, per se. But it will stiffen up the power supply rails back to specifications so that they won’t sag as much under a heavy or sustained load. Capacitance on the filters can start to fade a little after a couple decades. Most of the time, with most speaker pairings, it won’t be noticed, because these instruments were so overdesigned to begin with.
But with a heavy sustained load, the quality of an older supply output can start to falter at the margins. And as we all know, Thiels are all about plenty of sustained, very high quality current. Not watts. Current. I’ve known this since the first day I owned a pair of these. Your DR8 running bridged has more than enough high quality current reserve to drive a 3 Series Thiel. But your Thiels will tell you without fail, every time, when its amp is starting to miss a beat here and there. They are that relentlessly revealing of anything substandard, IMO.
Since they have emerged from their own recent reorganization, I found the people at Classe to be more than helpful with us old owners.
They would have no problems supplying a replacement jack set or screw, I’m sure. And if not, an RCA jack on these is a generic part. The originals are nothing fancy. A basic Vampire or similar grade is probably an upgrade on it.
The current design team was fairly busy with some new product work, and they were not able to get back to me with some rather esoteric capacitor performance and specification questions. But the tech and CS people were more than helpful and gave me detailed bench data to do the job I wanted. I stayed as close to the original Nichicon parts selections of the original designers as they would have done. No mods, no hot rodding. All at original values. A classic recap job. Just a little better due to improvements with the latest electrolytic technology. And they were rather impressed with the results, too!
The other thing you can do to keep your Classe (or any higher power amp) from straining, and your Thiels sounding their best, is a dedicated circuit and a high current power cord. I run my Classe straight into a hospital grade dedicated outlet (20 amps via 10/2 Romex straight to the service panel) with an ancient Tice Infinite Speed cable that only provides some transient protection. No other power conditioning. The only ‘conditioning’ is a $99 iFi AC Purifier in the same duplex outlet, which does not impede raw AC delivery in the least. And it sounds terrific, better than ever after two decades.
