Wilson Alexandria X-2 with ML N33???

Chris,

Thanks for the advise. I was lusting the Maxx IIs. The sub is arriving tomorrow w. my VTL 7.5 preamp. I will post in a few days my impressions of the subwoofer in & out & the VTL 7.5 vs. the Placette (you didn't help me to not do the upgrade with your advise in your column, I am about to try the fully balanced approach, but my cable lenghts aren't that long). Next is to either change my last cable to reference w. mm or start playing with some home made jobs. I am trying homemade cables soon as I can always use them & it is inexpensive. This reference MM balanced is getting expensive.

I did the reference MM balanced and my friend did the Ultra MM balanced and yes reference is better but barely, I would have saved the money and bought Ultra MM as it was better than my older reference with XL balanced... and that is all I needed.. Then I could have bought the sub sooner. The placette is awesome but the VTL will add some air into your system (my dealer has the S400 amp and it is pretty amaazing on WP7's)

Congrats!
Chris

Chris I am waiting to post some comparisons shortly. They should be installed tomorrow morning. Unfortunately I have to work. I just want to make sure it all works & arrived in one piece. I am curious if the VTL is worth the extra over the Placette. I will find out soon. As for the cable, I was thinking of upgrading my interconnects to balanced transparent ref w. MM. Based on your recommendation I will hold off. I know I heard more of a difference on the interconnects than on the speaker cables. For me the change from Ref w. XL to Ref. w. MM on my single ended cables was huge. On speaker cables was good. My buddy felt the speaker cables had a bigger difference than the interconnects. I was the other way around. On another note, when I first upgraded transparent from Ultra to Reference the entire system didn't snap into place until the last cable was upgraded. AFter I upgraded my final cable "like bang, wow snap" everything just improved. This is why it is so difficult to compare just one cable in a system. At this point I trust Transparent to be a very good cable in the context of our systems. I am sure there are other better cables but the risk might be too high to experiment. Enjoy listening.

Darren

Darren,

You are right about it snapping into focus, I felt the same way when I went from non-xl to xl and from ulra with xl to reference with xl complete.. my speaker cable is still reference xl and I have been hesitating on buying reference MM, and thinking of buying ultra MM... so I probably am not getting the full benifit. the speaker cable was the most import part in my systems prior, but only after having the interconnects in place.

It was a hard choice for me selling my placette but I found out that my Gamut CD1R was way better out of the balanced outputs so I switched to a balanced preamp.

Chris