Just for your information: While surfing the net on my search for a new amp/receiver & cdp, I also had a look on www.springair.de - and they still have some Thorens stuff on sale, including two cdps (one with valve output stage; and the smaller unit is said to have a very good headphone output, too), two power amps (one with class A mode), a preamp (with mm and mc inputs) and a dac. Prices seem reasonable for former high end stuff...

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

(If you have a look, please note that Spring Air has specialized on used stuff, so only products marked with a N are new!)

Checked them out. The CDPs have a quite interesting interface!

Never heard of the brand though.

Their McIntosh MR78 tuner is too expensive but Revox B-261 at about $405 USD is a darn good buy. I had reference tuners already so if you need one, jump on it now!

Do you know if they deliver outside of Germany, lini?

templeboy: Thorens is actually a Swiss company, that has built turntables in Germany (somewhere near the Black Forest, as far as I remember) for a very long time. I had the TD160 Super (a manual subchassis turntable) combined with a Grace 707 arm and a Yamaha mc-pickup (MC-405? I don't remeber...) and still have the cheaper TD280 Mk II (with Thorens arm and Stanton mm-pickup included) myself. Their turntables were good and famous. But you can have a look for yourself at www.thorens.ch (there's also some more info on the products offerend by Spring Air, if you click the "To Hi-Fi"-link in the turntables-section...). Anyway, Thorens obviously ignored the cd-age for too long, so they went bankrupt or something - but they seem to either recover or die very slowly. I hope they recover...

McBiff: I have just checked on their site, but they don't tell. So you'd probably best ask them yourself by email. But I don't think they'd have a problem with orders from Scandinavia.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

Thanks lini for the info.

No wonder as a member of the CD generation, I have never awared of their existance since their main product is turntable.

I must say the fit-n-finish alone of their CDPs justify the prices! No more CDP for me though as my next digital playback gear will be either SACD or DVD-A. I wait until the smoke clears and enjoy my tuners and plain CDs during the period. Although SACD has better players now, I believe it's another Beta from Sony and sooner or later it will fade away.

templeboy: I'm not sure about sacd, yet. I chatted with a studio professional, yesterday, and he told me that they are actually very fond of the dsd technology used in sacd, because that would require less filtering and bring along great dynamics, which they like as they can master their stuff with ~ 100 dB dynamic range. Nevertheless, I guess only time will tell, whether sacd can beat dvd-a in terms of sales volume or maybe will only become a niche product for a few audiophiles. Anyway, I'm not willing to buy either as long as there's no affordable (< US$ 800) hybrid sacd/dvd-a/dvd-video recorder with good sound quality, that supports multi-channel recording, too.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini