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I really do regret not sending my old one to him before I sold it back in 2018ish. Maybe one day I’ll get up the guts to mail him one of my current loudspeakers.

Some fun direct wiring going on here. Overall, I have to say that I think the parts quality looks good. This looks like it cost a lot to make. I can’t speak for measurements or the circuits, but someone cared here. I really wish that I’d sent my previous working Theta to Amir.

Indeed. Time will tell with the Trinnov of the world, but I haven’t seen this kind of thing trickle down as much as it needs to. At the high end of the market, modularity is clearly achievable, and then it’s more a question of follow through- will it actually be used, or will a product have the...

All done, ready for storage until my project!

There design of the braces and the RF shields is good. The case is quite rigid when they’re in place, everything is thicker gauge than you’d expect today, and fits together well.

The case is getting empty. So many different screws in use here!

And the really nice milled faceplate, which is split so you can upgrade the model designation or the button panel separately.

The backplane itself, where all cards plug in.

The display panel. On this unit, the display was broken but everything else worked well. I’m keeping the display PCB as a template for mounting my own buttons in the future. Also, a reveal! You can see the tinted front lens for the display has some electrical tape on it… what feature did they...

The (extremely heavy, very much testing the limits of a PCB card) power supply.

Some isometric views of the same I/O cards.

And the various I/O cards. This Theta Casablanca was pretty basic in configuration, but that’s perfect because I’m only after the case. “Basic” here still cost probably ten grand! The true achievement of this product is sticking to its promise. This thing has been around since 1996 on the...

The architecture, as you can see, consists of a number of cards on a common backplane. Some of these cards are just processors, with no external ports, and others are interface cards, like DACs or analog inputs. Here’s the processor cards for surround codecs.

The Theta Casablanca is a preamp / surround processor from the mid 90s. It’s still made today, albeit upgraded from what you’ll see here- those upgrades due to the extremely flexible architecture of the system itself. I’ve owned one of these in the past, bought used, implemented it, did some...

They do hiss at a 1m distance (see pic, that’s my desk setup) for me, when on and no source material is playing. The solution is to play some music or turn them off, and I prefer to play some music. I’m sensitive to noises like hiss and I don’t see this as a problem, many, many perfectly good...

Thanks for the heads up! 2FA FTW!

I'd like to measure some home built amplifier circuits objectively (SINAD, Multitone), and I'm debating between two interfaces for performing the measurement: Cosmos ADC & a good dac, or Motu M2 Here's what I'm thinking: I only want to measure amplifiers, not DACs or anything crazy. The...

I was really happy with the ELAC DBR62 in this role, powered by nCore NC400. I don’t have the setup anymore, now I use 8030C on my desk, but the ELAC were solid.

You're thinking too hard. Get the Schiit Stack, it's great. I have one, and it has no sound signature at all. If you want one, use EQ. Really, the Schiit Modius/Magnius combo has been going strong for me since they were released, no regrets, used in all balanced mode with HD6XX and Aeon 2 Closed...

Yeah- for a 2.2 system, it seems the SHD alone would be plenty… I use one for my 2.2 system, and it’s amazing. SHD does the volume, and I stream to it via Roon. For your AVR replacement needs, it has tons of inputs too.