mgruber

While bass is not the main thrust in the Thiel design you are right that the Jolida is not cutting it both in power and bass extension. I would suggest a solid state amp like a Bryston or Parasound of at least 100 watt per channel and a tube preamp since you seem to like that sound in most areas. Your old ARC amp does have better bass than the Jolida but is brittle on the top which would be annoying. Maybe try a tube preamp with the ARC as a start. Newer solid state amps will be much better and not a ton of money. You can get a better balance with different speaker cables (silver will just make it brighter) such as MIT but as an experiment try putting some 12ga or thicker copper zip cord on them and listen for the difference in the bass.

When the dcs Elgar was first imported into the US I attended a demo at CES. They had used a 4 channel Nagra digital recorder to record a string quartet at both sampling rates onto each pair of tracks. They could then switch between them on playback with perfect sync and no level differences on the exact same Nagra system. The 24/192 was a definite improvement. Seemed more detailed, better imaging, better top end. This is not double blind but it was a pretty good comparison. No upsampling to muddy things. At a friends home later I set up his dcs 972 upsampler into his Elgar on a really good high end system and were able to compare upsampled cds played on a CEC TL0 transport. The 24/192 won here as well.