Thiel Owners

tomic601

Good to see you again.   Happy Listening!

Another +vote for the Ken Fritz documentary.  He certainly has a passion for the high-end system and vinyl.

Happy Listening!

I feel like a 9 year old in a room full of adults...

My earlier post:
I am new to this mania, moving from a Pioneer 1050 SX to something more fun. Not ready for the cost of hifi...
I have some Theil CS 1.5 speakers that I want to power up. They will be in a small home office 12x15, but may move them into the garage/shop 24x24 but crowded as I spend a lot of time there woodworking and kicking back.
Considering cost,,,, for an amp I am looking at a Classe CAP 101 and a Bryston 2B with a 0.5B preamp.
I will use a Bluesound Node and stream Qobuz or my CD collection flac files from a hard drive.

Question - I am kinda hung up on getting an old Sansui Professional Integrated cause they are just cool and what I wanted back then. The AU9900 is 90 wpc at 8 ohm, 120 wpc at 4 ohm. Assuming the amp is re-capped, any thoughts on how they would match up with the 1.5s?

Thanks.

   As good as the Sansui AU9900 may have been / was in 1975, amplifier technology is now so many generations of sound quality beyond that as to make it likely unlistenable compared with a Classe CAP-101 or similar.  How is the Sansui much different or any more 'fun' from the Pioneer SX-1050 that's only a couple years newer design?
   I owned and/or listened at length to similar Pioneer and Sansui amps of the era.  I bought an Advent 300 receiver to replace the Pioneer and, aside from power output, it blew them both away in every sonic metric.  
   Old top-of-the-line Japanese electronics are usually really well-built and generally reliable, but today - in most cases - they are better to look at than listen to.  Their best FM tuners excepted, with some new parts...

johnhh - I concur with Scott and can add some tangentially-related personal experience. Not Sansui, but Yamaha of the same period. Our non-profit performance venue here in NH was given a Yamaha P2200 @250 w/c and the workhorse darling of its mid-70s era. I wanted it to somehow become a great sound-quality amp for our Thiel 1.5 small venue system. We had caps upgraded, replaced fuses, modified its output impedance, and generally souped it up as best we could. It sounded fine . . . until I substituted my Classé DR-9s or even the Adcom GFA-555II or 5300. These hi-fi amps 20-25 years more recent and designed with sound quality as a goal were in a far higher league.

I'll add that my experience with Japanese design(ers) of the 70s oozed conventionality. Japanese culture does not permit innovation. If any design element could be scrutinized, even by a high-school textbook, then the designer would risk his reputation by promoting it. I have some actual stories of Japanese companies buying avant-garde American designs and then subverting/ diluting them until they were "normalized", and thereby losing their specialness. It's no accident that Japan did not break into the high end in the 20th century.