Raylinds:
Thanks a lot for the kind comments and I'm so glad you have been enjoying the blog and this thread. I've learned a great deal from you guys as well. I can relate to your sense of impending letdown as you come to the End of your build. The process of watching the kit come together and the pleasure of handling the parts and understanding how things fit together is substantial. And wow, what a system you're building! I'm also planning on building another kit.
Mapman,
Brian, his supplier and tranny designer are going to "autopsy" the transformers to try to ascertain what happened. Short of the package having been scanned in a very strong magnetic field during shipping, they don't know what would've caused it. (I reassured Brian that I don't have an MRI machine in the room where I built the kit!) :-) So, all that remains to be seen.
Rob,
I am not surprised that the Tekton on speaker has stronger presence and pitch definition in the bass region. The M Lore is rated down to 38 Hz, a full 4 Hz lower than the De Capo, and the full-size Lore digs all the way down to 30 Hz so that's a full 12 Hz lower.
To give you one example of where the De Capo comes up short at the bottom end, and I've used this example before in my online reviews, the Steely Dan album "2 against Nature," has a wonderful, jazz inflected tune called "Negative Girl." The opening bars feature a dancing, percolating electric bass line that goes very, VERY deep. I've never tried to figure out exactly what the notes are, but I mean, you rarely, if ever, hear that instrument played down that low on recorded music. On my old Merlin TSM-mmi's, those very deep notes were completely missing in action  I mean, they just weren't there at all, which is not surprising because that monitor is only rated down to 55 Hz. On the De Capo, the notes are what I would describe as "just barely" there. If you really concentrate, you can hear them, but the lowest of the low are very faint. I'm imagining this is an area where the Lore would smoke the De Capo! What I am really curious about, and guess I would never really know unless I had the chance to do a head-to-head comparison with my gear in my room, is whether, lower end aside, the rest of the Lore presentation has the resolution, delicacy and coherence of the De Capo. I mean, in a way, I can see where it might, since the design philosophies of the two speakers are really not all that different. You have a wide range driver coupled with a supertweeter, crossed over quite high. And I think that the crossover in both is pretty minimalistic, although the De Capo somewhat more so in that regard.
