@charles1dad Re: why the drastic change in direction from my Thiel rig, great question. Part of it is the old “been there done that” idiom. Having spent over 20 years with the CS5i’s (which initially were challenging to please), I feel as though I reached somewhat of a pinnacle with that system, at least within my financial means. Newer high-power SS gear has become very pricey. Second, during 20+ years of continuous improvement with the Thiel system, I never could get the speakers to “wake up” at low (or even moderately conservative) volume. On balance, they did achieve a pretty awesome result IMO when listening at higher volume. Lastly, I have always longed to experience the wetter and more harmonically natural tube sound. The CS5i’s are 87 db efficient and dip to nearly 2 ohms in the lower frequencies. Amp killer. I never felt tube amplifiers were viable with them (although I remain convinced that they would benefit greatly from what good tubes bring sonically). I must say I never experienced reliability issues with robust SS amplifiers (Krell and early-gen Classe Audio). As an aside, I clearly recall listening (alone) in just my underwear when I had the Class A-biased Krell FPB 600c in the rig due to the incredible heat that amp generates.
Hopefully the NAT Audio integrated will soon be healthy to begin my tube journey. In the meantime, the SIT-2, being a known entity with the Nenuphars, should provide me with a baseline to ground my exploration into tubes driving the V2’s.