sdecker
Responses from sdecker
| Thiel Owners mobilesax -- I've heard Merlin VSMs at a few audio shows and at one store, but not in my own room vs whatever speakers I've owned at the time. I've had the utmost respect for his creating a solid design and then constantly refining it year after ... | |
| Thiel Owners The antithesis of the 'classic' Thiel sound, often stereotyped, never copied? I'm pulling these purely out of memory from dozens of audio shows and general familiarity, not A/B home listening! I could be wrong on any of these, corrections are we... | |
| Thiel Owners tomthiel -- and I presume his determination applied to the amplifier's ability to triple its short-term output into the lowest frequencies, the most problematic for any amp. I believe the IHF dynamic headroom test specified 1kHz, which obviously ... | |
| Thiel Owners Also, for many of these specifications, there isn’t any internationally agreed-upon measurement technique or standardization for something like peak current. An amp may deliver 60A peak for a millisecond, but any musical transient is much longer t... | |
| Thiel Owners My understanding is a faster slew rate for a given component is better -- up to a point at which little-to-no difference is heard. Musical transients are only so fast, and if the component is substantially faster than the fastest musical transien... | |
| Thiel Owners My two cents and two thousand words on Spectral products. It seems the only press they get (along with the Berkeley Alpha DAC) is Robert Harley, for better or worse. Goodwins audio outside Boston carry both, and I had a thorough audition of the Al... | |
| Thiel Owners The seller is taking quite a few rhetorical / marketing liberties to differentiate the SE from the 'regular' 2.4! | |
| Thiel Owners @tomic601: "How they measure is hyper important IF the art is to move forward"I agree 100% with this when it comes to any and all speaker designers, manufacturers and researchers. Most of the real progress has come from individuals and/or compani... | |
| Thiel Owners As an electrical test engineer and lifelong audio geek, I've found Stereophile's measurements rudimentary. For the most part, the testing strategies, reporting, and the depth of analysis hasn't evolved in decades. And they don't tell us a whole ... | |
| Thiel Owners You're welcome. As long-winded about audio as I can get, be relieved (all of you!) I'm not transcribing my thorough listening notes here of all the gear mentioned on this forum that I've compared to other stuff, or pre- vs post-modifications, tha... | |
| Thiel Owners And, by Dynaudio's ad copy, a couple 'tricks' in their crossover to capitalize on their first-order slopes to mimic a sloped baffle and correct the phase response between drivers. Stereophile's step response plot of the C1 even looks more coh... | |
| Thiel Owners jafant, these were separate amp and preamp shootouts. The Plinius power amp compared to my McCormack was a class-A SA-103 (125wpc 8ohms, 220wpc 4ohms), that had comparatively unremarkable sound. The Plinius Kaitaki preamp vs my Sonic Frontiers w... | |
| Thiel Owners unsound, thanks for the compliment. I'm hardly a 'vintage' guy, but my late-production (2001) Line1 SE has been *completely* reliable over nearly twenty years of often daily use. Of course, I can't leave well enough alone, and it too has been su... | |
| Thiel Owners All McCormack power amps have a 100k input impedance which is fine for any preamp. EXCEPT for the DNA500, and its monoblock equivalents DNA750 of only 10k, and I believe these to be the only McCormack amps that offer balanced inputs via a phase-s... | |
| Thiel Owners jafant, just a (looong) clarification. Steve made a name among the tweakers post McCormack, but the company in its prime throughout the '90s and early-00s was substantial, offering moderately-priced well-engineered preamps, DACs, phono stages, et... |