Thiel Owners

@solobone22 

Hello!

Thanks for sharing your experience...especially considering Bel Canto’s amps are definitely on my short list of auditioning. 
I may have to adjust my thinking as I am primarily looking at D-amplification from an efficiency standpoint but haven’t researched too deeply in how well it would match with the rest of my tube-based gear...especially considering I went with tube line stage & phono preamp to add some “lushness” to the revealing nature of my CS3.5’s. 
Thanks again & please let me know how those 600M’s go along with your Levinson. 
Arvin 

@tomic601 
Did Stereophile review the Kento already? I didn’t renew my subscription last year. Not happy with JA’s promotion, even hype, of MQA. Jim Austin taking the reins was a deal breaker for me. 
Meanwhile, JA’s protocols really put Thiels and Vandersteens at a disadvantage. Comparing Stereophile’s and Soundstage’s measurements of the CS2.4, for example, it’s almost like they were not measuring the same speaker (Soundstage contracts with NRC which has a real anechoic chamber and they can measure at 2 m). The 2.4 has what appears to be the flattest frequency response in the Soundstage database!

What is really, really unfair is designing an amp for just the high pass and knowing the load like the back of your hand - and at two price points. 
I will post something  quasi politically correct about JA tomorrow... I suppose it’s a tightrope 

But... I did hear the Kento in a large room with the M5 amps and a Mac Tube front end..... and let me just say I have NEVER heard Mac gear image like that EVER....

Harrow & The Harvest - Tennessee, should make ya weep

Beetle - JA's testing procedure was dictated by physical / budget constraints. Fair enough. In the early years he explained how / in what ways his measurements were misconstruing the truth. But as time went on, he spoke as though the anomalies from his procedural limitations were real, such as not mentioning that anomaly A, B, Etc. would vanish at a 2.5 or 3 meter listening distance. He also gravitated toward language showing how his measurements confirmed or related to the reviewer's listening notes, rather than the actual parameters of the product under test. This editorial drift smacks of publisher's demands for internal self-legitimization. JA certainly has the knowledge and experience to understand the territory, and the linguistic skills to explain it well. Whereas founder Gordon Holt and second publisher Larry Archibald were true music and gear lovers, it doesn't seem like the subsequent publishers had service of music as their driving principle.