A little overkill for the C1's, but yes, heavenly :music:

Better safe, than sorry. :D

Joe, I respectfully disagree. I see your point; I too, believe you spend the most on speakers, and then accordingly and proportionally on the electronics to drive them. So while in this case, the Pass front-end costs more than the C1; I consider the C1 to be "good enough", where you virtually can't "over-feed" it with a quality, costly signal. Sure...C1s don't cost what TADs do; and I know they don't quite have the cache...but I find it hard to believe they'd leave some signal on the table, from any front-end.

OK, strike that. :no: I wrote the above, when I was under the assumption we were...perhaps naively...talking about maybe $30-40k worth of electronics. My point was, even though...in general...I believe you spend the most on speakers; there comes a saturation point, where the speakers are so good...you almost can't "over-feed" them. Can't give them too "good" a signal, for fear that they leave something on the table. Then I see that we're talking about $65,000 mono-blocks :eek2:

No offense...because I know here, I should probably act like an $80,000 power and pre combo is no big deal; but that's an obscene amount of money, and IMHO..."over-kill" for even the $40k CR-1s.

So sure; I agree $65,000 mono-blocks are over-kill for C1s (but not C4s :D)

Conversely, I am proud to say that I now drive my C1 Signatures...with the winner of a 3-amp shoot-out, the McCormack DNA-225. Cost on the used market; I jumped on a real bargain, and picked it up for a cool, even K. :banana:

You took the long way 'round, but I somewhat agree. I know from experience (my own) that even low priced, non-audiophile speakers truly benefit from expensive electronics. My TADs require careful care and feeding. One exception to the high priced amp feeding the TADs was the CJ Pr.350, thinking back, that drove the heck out of the TADs and still maintained very high transparency. I still wish I had that amp today. I have a higher respect for it now.

Steve makes wonderful gear and is a true gentleman.

From my limited experience, high end front ends with so so speakers will sound better than so so front ends with high end speakers.

One can squeeze out quite a bit of performance from a modest speakers nowadays, if the front end is up to the task.

Wow, I have to say I really feel differently. I mean, it's chicken and egg; and luckily for us audiophiles...it's all important, right?

But I would be inclined to argue...with say $10k, you get better sound with a $1k amp and $9k speakers...than the other way around. I don't necessarily think the argument is the front-end is less important (and you see, I'm mostly focusing on power-amp versus speakers...pre-amp is a different animal); I just think it's easier to make a "decent" power-amp for $1k, than a "decent" (sounding) pair of speakers for the same, modest sum.

That's how I thought so too.. :scratch2:

well, I don't have that much of experience, so, I'm out on factual basis. :smoking::D

I completely agree...right now I am listening to my $700 Era D4s with $18,000 of close-to-SOTA Conrad-Johnson and Wadia electronics (a Wadia 121 DAC source [no slouch), a CT-5 preamp and Premier 350 power amp), and there's very little to criticize.

I personally have found the greatest success putting more money into source and amplication quality and less, proportionally speaking, into speakers. There is no getting around the simple fact that the best transducer in world cannot put back information that is lost by less superior source and amplification electronics. Superior speakers are only going to transduce very well exactly the quality of the information in front of them. Put crap source and amplification in front of a very expensive and accurate speaker, and all you're going to get is perfect transduction of crap. Once signal is gone, transducers ain't gonna put it back. GIGO was never truer.