Lyra Olympos vs Parnassus naked original version

Thanks a lot for your opinions. Everything was quite useful to me. I will go for Olympos when I got the money.

Hello Jonathan,

I find this a very interesting thread. Can you tell us something about the speakers, phonostage and amplifiers, as well as turntable and arm that you use to voice your cartridges?

Thanks,

Jonathan Weiss

Thanks for the detailed history, Jonathan. I too would be interested in what components you frequently use. I recall your using the Graham 2.2 tonearm (eons ago) but can't recall much else.

The particular owner of the Olympos is indeed known to heavily tailor his system. On any given day, there may be multiple parts changes in his exotic, transmitting triode amplifier.

One problem I face in his system is that of plugging in a known "neutral" component. It rarely sounds neutral (I'm not using the term in the pejorative sense).

Frank can tell you a bit about his tastes. I was digging around for a temporary web page I built to document that evening, but can no longer find it.

Basically, we ran two Schroeder References on his Galibier Gavia - one of Jacaranda and (~15 grams eff. mass), and the other, an 18 gram Ebony.

If memory serves, the phono stage was an Artemis Labs PH-1 (Slagle/Intact Audio step-up transformer), feeding a Dave Slagle autoformer volume control, and then into the above referenced exotica, and lastly into some Lowther front loaded horns with supporting bass (Klipschorn) below that.

The system loves opera.

There was unquestionably a lack of refinement in the well worn Parnassus, but in this system, one could easily tell the lineage and resemblance between it and the Olympos - not to diminish the "goodness" of the Olympos in any way, and not to diminish the importance of all of the other elements in the implementation.

I think this speaks highly of your design sensibilities - back the the Mark Knopfler example (above).

Cheers,
Thom