Thiel Owners

this should prove interesting.   i sometimes get a crackle when i play the cut Gaia from James Taylors hourglass.   i call it the system destroyer

The most common oddity from a woofer is the bottoming of the suspension: the spider hits the basket plate. Thiel's short coil is out of harm's way from bottoming on the back plate. The voice coil adhesive is high-temperature. So, unless you overheat to the point of burning out the voice coil, most noises are transient and do no harm.

However, one can hope that your experience might help you set future limits. Drivers do burn out.

my experience with blown Thiel drivers is as follows and i have owned a set of thiel speakers since 1985 starting with the 2.0.  never have blown a woofer in all these years which is good.  Blew a midrange on a 2.2 but it was about 12 years old and i think it just failed due to nothing i did.   nothing ever with the 2.4's.  not so lucky with the 2.7's.  have replaced  3 of the coax mid/tweeter.   the first time i think it was a bad driver as it failed after 2 months.  i have been using the PS BHK 250 after the first failure and it is a very robust amp and not prone to clipping so not really sure what happened on 2 and 3.   however i keep spare mid/tweeter coaxes here just in case.

Thanks for the input.   (Scary stuff for us 2.7 owners, ronkent!)

The record played that caused the crackling was probably the most dynamic recording I've ever played on the Thiels.  I didn't really know how loud it would get and usually I have a volume control right near me ifI think things are getting too loud.  But I didn't want to ruin this gentleman's listening experience by suddenly dropping the volume.

Anyway, the speaker seems fine.   I generally don't listen really loud - about 70 db seems to be my comfort zone, unless I crank it more when I"m listening down the hall.  The 2.7s seem to be able to take quite a bit of volume, but I believe I normally play well within their limits.