Atma-Sphere in CO?


I'm looking to listen to one of Ralph's amps.  I'm in Denver and have Coincident PREs and a pair of Coincident's wonderful 300b Frankenstein's if anyone's interested in doing a comparison.  Obviously the speakers won't travel, but I'd be willing to pack up the amps and do some driving.

Will probably catch AS at RMAF, but would also love to do a home based A/B comparison...
128x128cal3713
@cal3713 thanks for the update.   I am well aware of the virtues of the Franks, which is why I am keeping them.  If I had to choose between the Franks and the M-60's, I'd probably keep the M-60's, but it would be a though choice.   Your PREs are more efficient than my SVIIs, so I can see how the balance might be tipped towards the Franks in your case. BTW, what tubes are you using in the Franks?
Its funny, I've thought about bringing in a Lyngdorf for my downstairs system, where I have significant room acoustics challenges, and returning the Franks to the upstairs system for use with smaller scale works.  But if I do that, I will not be letting go of the M-60's.
Keep us posted if you bring in the Pass.  I will be surprised if it displaces the Franks, but it would be an interesting experiment. 
I assume you are talking about installing the Duelunds in the Franks.  I haven't done that yet, but you might want to consider the PRE crossovers also.  I recently rebuilt the crossovers of my SVIIs, and the work substantially improved bass articulation among other improvements.  I don't have any actual knowledge of the PRE crossover design, but in Coincident models below the PRE, the design and parts list seems pretty consistent.  My guess is if you look you will find Solen caps and resistors, and they are not all that hard to beat. 
Just a FWIW- we've had terrible luck with the MIT and Transparent cables; we've never gotten them to play nice with our gear. No idea why, but you might want to run that comparison again if you can borrow a different set of interconnects.

Also- the amps are very transparent, but if they've been sitting a while, I wouldn't take them seriously until they have about 20-30 hours on them. Further, they need about an hour to really sound right.
@atmasphere Thanks for the information Ralph. Fortunately I was running them with my Duelund speaker cables and Ocellia interconnects. I’ll hook them up to my little desktop speakers and let them play for a couple days and then give them another shot before returning.

@brownsfan And I have the EML XLS in my Franks. I used to also have Mullards as my rectifiers, but unfortunately my tubes went bad.   I replaced them with standard NOS RCA 54Us.  Will probably give the Mullards another (3rd) shot at some point in the future. As for caps, the PREs only have one capacitor (and two induction coils) in the crossover. Isreal says its a Mundorf. I’ve seen in there and it’s wrapped so I can’t confirm whether that’s true.
@cal3713 I just recently picked up a pair of used EML XLS and also have the mullard rectifiers.  Tried the Elrogs twice, which were superb, but they failed.  Not sure if the new Elrogs are holding up in the Franks or not.  But they were to die for tubes.  As for the PREs, I'm guessing the two inductors are in series with the woofer and midrange, and the Mundorf cap is in series with the tweeter.  This is the arrangement I found in the SV IIs, except that the cap was a Solen.  The woofer had a cap and resistor in parallel, as did the midrange.  I'm guessing that like the SVIIs,  the PREs have these additional caps and resistors in parallel.  Some say replacing those parallel caps and resistors don't make a difference, but my experience was that replacing them really transformed the SVIIs.  I did not replace the inductors in my speakers.  I was told the Solens Israel uses are really good and there was no need to replace them. 
@brownsfan Actually there aren't any caps or resistors on either the woofers or midrange.  Only that one cap attached to the tweeter. 

From Coincident:  "The signal path contains only one capacitor (Mundorf – The most transparent cap for the purpose) and two inductors (proprietary 10 AWG OFC Litz - one for the midrange and one for the bass). That is it."  Due to a shipping nightmare, I've been forced to look inside my speakers to find out what got damaged (before eventually shipping to Isreal for a full repair) and can confirm that that's true...