Thiel Owners

SMc has worked on my amp twice making upgrades. Both were very successful. I suppose one advantage is that Mr. McCormack will "tailor" an amp to fit your needs and purposes. Like a good suit, instead of buying off the rack, Steve will be sure you get what fits. I am not surprised that your amp did well in comparison with others. At this point, SMc upgrades are essentially a hand-crafted product/solution w/o the need for mass production, a large dealer network to support, and ad budgets, etc. They can focus on what sounds best rather than worry about all of the requirements of running a large and complex production and sales operation. If they hear something better, it does not require a big redesign or operational change. This ongoing R&D may eventually run its course and further improvement may no longer be possible given whatever limitations the original amps create. Sometimes one must start from scratch to do better. Tesla seems to be working on that angle. But for now, and into the foreseeable future, what SMc Audio does seems to work very well. Perhaps this is why and how SMc can compete with more expensive amps.

Actually it took three upgrades to make mine *perfect*, though the first one was just the ’basic’ upgrade of the time. I imagine by now it’s a labor of love, as Steve is past able to retire if he chose. He’s spent decades listening to the best passive discrete parts to mix and match into his existing circuit boards and amp topology, as you say, knowing exactly how to tailor his suit to fit us.

Just a couple examples of ’business as usual’, as part of my middle-of-the-road (non-Thiel-specific) upgrade, he uses 10" of some massive Shunyata Copperhead AC power cable to just connect the rear AC input to the front panel power switch. 1" per channel of some sort of carbon fiber conductor to go from the WBT NextGen RCA input jacks to the circuit board. 4" of Van den Hul high-end speaker cable to go from the output transistors to the Cardas speaker terminals. And that was in 2006 as part of a B-level upgrade!

The beauty is that for some time he *did* the mass production, dealer network, advertising, at least on a modest scale, and enough to have a long-running well-regarded set of products, that were a big bang for the buck as his designs allowed for modest parts to sound ’good enough’, and little money was put into cosmetics.

A good design is still a good design, optimized by the parts and their integration. Just look at all the recycled vacuum tube circuits from the 50s and 60s that are used in today’s top gear with fully modern parts in the signal path and support circuits (power supplies, auto-bias, layout). It would seem he could extract a bit more by further optimizing his circuit board layouts 25+ years later, but that would be a question for Mr. McCormack to assess price vs performance, a calculation he’s always excelled at...

It's this designing for the long haul I find similar to Thiel, and find this approach to be of personal value to me in the components I choose to make up my audio system as a whole.  And other products of note I own...

yabe1951

Thank You for the McCormick power amp suggestion.
Conrad Johnson will be in a similar camp here.
Happy Listening!

sdecker

Thank You for the McCormick confirmation as well.
Very impressive power spec(s).

Happy Listening!

McCormack: corrected.