Thiel Owners

Pretty much all designs have trade-offs. You can reduce, if not eliminate, them by throwing more money at it but real-world speaker design is a series of compromises. Sure, Wilsons can play loud as hell, but at what (sonic) cost?

The smaller midrange diaphragms in Thiels are much more rigid than those used in Wilsons. This is a function of both materials and size. The upside of Jim Thiel’s choice is that you hear far less distortion. IOW, a more realistic recreation of the recording, warts and all.

Other than the TAD Ref One with it’s largish coax (beryllium at that), all of my favorite speakers have midrange drivers <5” diameter. Tbf, ability to reproduce The Who at concert SPLs is very low on my list.

My ATC 110s have a 3" midrange that will play incredibly loudly.  it's the same midrange that is in the SCM 300 ASL that will do 121 db continuously.  I doubt any Wilson product can touch that.  The crossover to the woofer is 380hz.  The midrange also has extremely low distortion.  

I decided I liked small midranges a while ago and I think the main reason is that they don't beam.  That means the off axis response is much closer to the on axis response.  Reflected sound will not be radically different from what comes directly from the drivers.  This means the speaker will sound good in a variety of rooms.  This is one of the first things I noticed about my Thiel 2 2s.  I got them for a living room system that was far from acoustically ideal and they were great.  The first order crossover means that if you walk right up to them they have wild response fluctuations due to the driver interactions but the overall sound in the room was immensely enjoyable.  Sit back in a good spot and get a great audiophile experience.  Turn them on while you're doing other things around the house and get a great casual listening experience.  

http://atcloudspeakers.co.uk/hi-fi/loudspeakers/tower-series/scm300aslt/

http://studio-hifi.com/images/ATC75-150S_JeffBagby.pdf
"As you can see the nonlinear distortion is extremely low, with 3rd order in the neighborhood of -70dB at my low crossover point. These levels are very close to the noise floor in my room and I would consider this to be in the state-of-the-art range for midrange distortion. "

jon - those ATC measurements are commendable and likely to produce very fine results in the frequency domain. For this Thiel thread, I will add a few comments.

Loudness: 4th order or any higher than 1st order slopes allow the driver to operate in its robust range and attenuate the out of band requirements, so they can play louder cleaner. Things get so much easier in that world; that's why most designers go there. Thiel's 01 used 3rd order and the model 02 used 2nd order slopes. The change for the 03 and after to first order increased the difficulty of the design undertaking by an order of magnitude, at least.

And as I have mentioned in the past, by removing phase and time coherence, the ear-brain gives a free pass to many other anomalies; they no longer are scrutinized as real and therefore can be ignored. Examples include the edge diffraction and soft-dome break-up modes. Diffraction isn't particularly audible with high order slopes because the brain doesn't associate the source with reality, and diaphragm breakup is attenuated to lower loudness and becomes less audible. Note that the literature considers 4th order Linkwitz-Reily filters to have 0 phase shift, but that is because they pretend that 360°, which rotates phase angle a full cycle, is exempt because 360° looks like 0 on a graph. Also, the speakers described do not look time-aligned, so the transient wave-fronts will reach the ear at different times as well as phase delayed relative to the input. Many commentators say that doesn't matter, which is because the ear-brain is so good at reconstructing the probable intended sound which has been scrambled by the speakers. Our work at Thiel demonstrated to our satisfaction how that brain-work of reconstructing the probable-intentioned waveform serves to decouple the listener from the emotional experience of the music. As I have said, most commentators disagree and deem higher order filters to be OK, and first order, phase coherent wavefronts to be unhearable and meaningless.

I suspect that Thiel lovers have identified the "trueness" of phase and time coherence and are willing to put  up with the attendant compromises including less smooth frequency domain performance and higher audibility of many ancillary anomalies. Jim spent a lifetime identifying and reducing those anomalies (sonic baggage) and I am now stretching the envelope to include cleaner electronic performance which original budgets and materials science did not permit.

The ATC actives use some kind of active phase compensation to align the drivers at the crossover frequencies.  I don't think they go to the trouble Thiel did to keep time alignment throughout.  What big active ATCs have that little else can match is massive dynamics.  I think there is a dynamic linearity as well that makes them very revealing in a way other speakers can't match.  This ability lends a different type of realism that would probably be impossible for first order speakers to achieve.  ATC believes in making the drivers as well as possible so the crossover doesn't have to be complex.  They don't image like Thiels and they don't sound near as lively at low volumes.  I consider my Thiel/ATC systems to be quite complementary.

They describe the active crossover as "380Hz and 3.5kHz, 4th order, critically damped with phase compensation".  They discuss phase response in their literature but don't give specifics.  They're clearly in favor of linear phase response and it's a design goal.  "An ideal speaker system should have phase response linear with frequency, which in simple terms means that all frequencies produced by the driver reach the listener’s ear at the same time. "


http://www.transaudiogroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ATC_Engineering_Goals_and_Approaches.pdf

Phase coherence does not guarantee time coherence.
Time coherence does guarantee phase coherence.