Thiel Owners

Rob - thanks so much for posting Iconoclast. Lovely Sunday read. I highly recommend anyone interested in what’s going on in cable read these papers. No worries for those less mathematically inclined; all the concept engineering is clear without the equations which can serve as illustrations to non-engineers. I’ll be ordering some to compare and contrast.

@everybody wanting to upgrade their 2.4 to 2.4SE..

(And I don't want to put Rob Gillum out if a job here.. ;-) )

I've contacted Clarity Cap and they are only willing to make the 14 and 28 uF caps of their newest purity range (PUR) if I buy a minimum of 25 pieces..

26 pieces would allow for 13 2.4's to be upgraded.. so I need twelve of you guys out there willing to upgrade with the Clarity Cap.. 

PM me if you want this Upgrade.. 

Pieter

All the little details added together may make for a difference.

http://www.claritycap.co.uk/products/pur.php.TomD

Re: Clarity PUR, this is getting above CS2.4SE, all the more so if you also upgrade the resistors and other caps (and if you have an FST board and also replace the coils).

I recall @tomthiel wrote about PUR some weeks ago. I had the impression this line is the next step in the progression SA>ESA>CSA>PUR. But the brochure makes me wonder if PUR is also a step above CMR, which had been the top-shelf Clarity. Curious to see the pricing. 
 

Might be tough to find 12 others willing to pony up for custom cap purchase. I hope I’m wrong. But not a dealbreaker to parallel, for example, 18+10 uF (or, I see 20+8 is also possible). That said, I would not parallel 27+1 or 13+1 after reading an anecdotal report this range of bypassing *might* yield deleterious results. I know the 1 uF bypasses were specified in the original CS2.4 but maybe not a coincidence that Jim Thiel went to full capacitance in single caps for the SE?

Beetlemania - good to see you. I can clarify. All these subsequent caps are way beyond the SE and I agree that dropping ’SE’ might be appropriate for these further upgrades. Jim’s Signature Edition was his late-life offering and the SA cap was the only electronic upgrade. It was CC’s best of its day and won the auditions against other caps including Mundorf and other expensive offerings. Other SE upgrades were the cosmetic bits.

I compared CC SAs to ESA and CSA and reported that the ESA was an incremental improvement and CSA a substantive one. Clarity’s patented PUR breakthrough is replacing the ubiquitous tin/zinc end caps with a tin/copper solution-which is a game changer. Later they added a Van den Hull silver leads option for short money. The CMR is a series cap which uses the same copper end caps. CC discovered that the geometry of the end cap could be improved. In round numbers it went from industry standard (1mm?) to 10mm thick for both the CSA (PUR) and CMR (PUR+). The upcharge is about 20% and said to be a high value improvement. I haven’t tested them due to my present workspace pause, but I am excited.

Regarding your single vs bypass comment - there are trade-offs and as you say, Jim landed on single with a better main cap. The smaller bypass value has shorter discharge time and other reactive improvements, producing a cleaner onset transient than the less worthy larger primary cap. But it also introduces electronic discontinuity in the cap bundle. When the primary cap is good enough, the discontinuities outweigh the timing improvement. In my direct comparisons, one CSA (even the SA) definitely wins, a slight ’capacitor tizz’ goes away.

Jim developed that 1uF cap for the CS5 where it is not a bypass but the capacitive element in the two bucket brigade electronic delay lines that fine-tune the timing of the two midrange drivers. In its day, that was a world-class cap. It became a sonic improvement for following products around our Solens main caps. It got perhaps its best use in the tweeter of the CS3.6 where four of them are bundled as the 4uF series feed block. Today, it lacks the improvements of the new short geometry, silver wire and of course copper end caps. Also, I suspect the post-ELPAC caps may no longer be tin / styrene.