Thiel Owners

jafant,

I'm glad you are still carefully considering a range of cable options for your system. I seem to remember that you were going to arrange another demo of SwissCables sometime soon. Is that still going to happen?

I am very happy with the Cardas Clear Reflection XLRs I'm using between my DAC and preamp and between my preamp and monoblocks, which drive my Thiel 2.2 speakers. The Clear Reflection cables provide a good degree of detail without being hyper-resolving. They also allow a very natural fullness or richness to flow from my system. I'm no longer experiencing significant listening fatigue, even with older, poorly recorded music, and well-recorded music sounds fantastic.

I'm still thinking, though, that I may be able to improve on my speaker cables a bit. I'm currently using Cardas Parsec speaker cables, which are decent for the price but are positioned in the middle of the current Cardas line. I'd like to try Clear Reflection speaker cables, but the cost for a 26-foot run is out of my price range. So now I'm looking at the possibility of reducing the length of my speaker cables to a more reasonable 8 feet by using longer (18 foot) XLRs between my preamp and amps. This change would allow me to try some higher end speaker wire without breaking the budget. A pair of 18-foot Clear Reflection interconnects would be quite expensive, though, so I've been considering trying some pro-audio XLR interconnects made with Grimm TPR wire if I were to move my amps closer to the 2.2s but farther away from the rest of my audio equipment. The cost would be less than $150 for a pair of Grimm XLRs. 

Have you or any other Thiel owners ever tried pro-audio interconnects like the Grimm with any success?

sdl4 - not Grimm, but yes Mogami and Benchmark. The pro brands I have tried perform adequately, but always come up with less ultimate resolution and 'you are thereness' against my references, which include some upper end Straightwire and Morrow.

My previous setup as shown in my virtual system put all the gear including speakers at the same end of the room. Next time I'll go for even shorter runs of both interconnects and speaker cable. As shorter is better.

@john_5912

I'm currently between amps and now am trying to find reasonably priced, high powered, and high performing amps that will last.

The 3.7's, similar to my 5is, need an amp that can double down to 2 ohms. It took me a couple of years to find an amp. I have the good fortune to live near an audio store whose owner let me take used stuff home to try. Large Levison (blah to me), Krell (too shouty), Classe (too soft), among others, did not do it for me. I had a Coda at 300wpc into 8 ohms that sounded good until I cranked it up and then the sound became strained and harsh.

I liked a Pass X350 but the more recent models were too much for my pocket book. I stumbled across a McCormack DNA-500 out of Pennsylvania and am very happy with it. To my hearing, the only thing it lacks compared to the Pass is that last bit of black, so silent background.

Thanks for listening,

Dsper

I’m curious. How was the levinson blah since I was not able to get one. My model 25 classe has so been extremely nice to listen to I feel like it takes a little edge off but not too much. Just gives it the right amount of naturalness and timbre. The adcom would get stressed at louder volumes vs the classe which handles it with ease and extremely clean dynamics.