Where to find 'good sounding' resistors?

Texas Components TX2575 should be on your short list. They're largely considered the lowest noise resistors you can get. You can only buy them from the manufacturer:

http://www.texascomponents.com/
713-468-3882

FWIW, Texas Components makes the S102C and S102K for Vishay. The TX2352 and TX2575 are essentially naked versions of the S102 using bulk metal foil. Michael Elliott from Counterpoint/Aria explains the Vishay hierarchy here:

http://www.ariaaudio.com/WVVishay.html

Are there other applications where these Vishays work well or do they just sound superior in all cases?

C'mon Dan, you know the answer to that!

There's no such thing as a resistor that sounds best in every applicaton. Not Vishays and not anything else. Nick uses Vishays to load our phono inputs but he uses other resistors in other places in the circuits of our preamp. That's part of what took him five years to finalize the design. The circuit was settled after a year or so, the rest was all fine tuning. He still has a whole room full of cast off components, some of them very costly but not best for the application he tried them in.

In my stepup transformer days I tried 6 or 7 brands of resistors in many dozens of combinations to fine-tune loading. They all sounded different and Vishays were not the best in our system. Riken ohms were notably less edgy, since they don't suffer from the skin effect that metal foil resistors are prone to.

The only way to know is to listen, in your system.

Subject to their power limitations, I've used TX2575 throughout Atma preamp, Merlin bass augmentation module & modded SCD-1-- replacing everything in signal path from generic carbon comp, Riken carbon film, top Caddock MK132 & TF020, and several types of SMD. They are extraordinarily detailed, transparent & musical, with no sterility whatsoever. They are the straightest line to a high-end component.

Hi Doug,

Glad to see the hangover from the RMAF weekend didn't keep you down long!

Yes, Nick has mentioned trying film resistors in crossovers. I can see where the signal coming in to the suts would be very susceptible to resistor make/style, not to mention value. But you're absolutely right. The only way to know is to try them out.