Thiel Owners

Batmanfan - I have been told that one of Jim's primary preamps was the Sonic Frontiers 2-piece gold unit. But I don't know if it was used for the 3.7s. I know that at shows we never mixed and matched pre and power amps, seeming poor form from an industry allies perspective.

batmanfan,

As you're keeping the 28B monos, I'd suggest you consider the BP17 cubed preamp.  IMO, it's a neutral preamp,  and neither adds to  nor subtracts from what is on a CD.  It does require some additional break-in beyond the 100 hours  of testing by Bryston. 

The Sony HAPZ1es was my favorite streamer/server. 


For those of us who want to keep the “computer” out of the two channel setup, this piece performed the best.  Prior to buying the Hap I had a Bluesound Vault2.  I felt that the Bluesound offered marginally superior sonics, but in order to incorporate it into my system I would have had to run a 70 foot Ethernet cable fro my bedroom to the living room. Ain’t gonna happen. 


Either unit had a 1TB hard drive which was more than sufficient for my collection.  With the Hap I bought a cheap apple disk drive - $80 - and loaded approximately 600 cd’s worth of files onto it.  That, and my iTunes library, didn’t tip over 500GB.  Sheesh.


The Hap’s interface was simple, straightforward, no nonsense. The only reason why I sold it was because 2018,  in a word, sucked for me.  That’s the final addition to my current setup. They seem to hover around $1200 pre-owned (I sold mine for that) and have been $1999 new for the past few years. It is a worthy product for anyone’s setup. 

oblgny

Good to see you as always. Hope that you are enjoying the CS 2.4 loudspeakers. Feel free to report its merit(s) compared to the 3.5 model.
Winding down Summer here in the deep South.

Happy Listening!