Martin Logan vs. Thiel

In the worst cases, you get clipping and/or muddy bass. (Probably that muddy bass *is* clipping, but maybe clipping in that sound region sounds muddy.) Clipped treble or upper midrange is particularly offensive, at least to me.

Other times you'll just get reduced dynamics or dynamic range, and there are probably other symptoms of which I'm not aware.

Martin Logans easy to place!?!? Not in my experience. I think they're a pain in the lower posterior to place, to be quite frank about it.

Furthermore, conventional wisdom, confirmed at least in my room with my speakers, is that 30" from the rear wall is not nearly enough for ML panels. I have a lot of brick in my room, so perhaps that's complicating things for me, but I had a lot of image smear when I just plopped mine in not too far from the walls.

The financial trade does sound attractive, though.

MLs are not easy, and in fact I'd call them one of the more difficult loads around, especially the older models. The older CLS full-range panel dipped under 1 ohm for some significant fraction of its range, a load that drives most amps insane.

For grins I tried driving my Odysseys (new hybrids that don't ever go much below 2 ohms) with a fairly respectable B&K AV6000 (175 wpc @ 4 ohms), and the result was ugly. It definitely ran out of gas, even in my small (14x 15) room. Some other folks have suggested driving MLs with SET amps and I find this totally incomprehensible with the possible exception of biamping the panels with a SET - and something massive, probably solid state, for the cones below 250 Hz.

I have a lot less experience with Thiels, but they appear to me to be fairly typical loads, so I'd expect them to be a lot easier to drive than any MLs.