Thiel Owners

George - by tonality I intend to mean the whole perception of tone, which includes the fundamental and all the overtones. Tonal information, as I understand it, is processed differently than time information.

A very interesting, to me, aspect is the interplay between tone and time. I am presently working on a new termination scheme of the piano string at the bridge. Various schemes deliver various temporal envelopes relative to the frequency (tonal) response of the note.
(all related to the impedance variables at the bridge and the length and tuning of the back-scale between the bridge and the string's final termination.) The fascinating aspect is that the fundamental is only required momentarily, for the brain to "get it" (understand the harmonic structure), rather than having to create a phantom fundamental inferred from the upper harmonics (which takes lots of work.) Anyhow, once the real fundamental is there for a instant, the upper harmonics make sense, and then the phantom can drop out and the upper harmonic structure is more intelligible on its own. This harmonic development / sonic motion is related to the phase interactions of the string and bridge, which can be manipulated. Imagine that.

Tom, 

Thank you.

@vair68robert

I was doing my yoga this morning and found my eyes about a foot away from the outriggers on my 2.4s. Do you have outriggers? If any part of the outriggers is not tight, the Ayre tone glide can result in a rattle over portions of the sweep!

We are barely scraping the surface here. The point is that the inner functioning of the ear mechanism itself is vastly complex, even before the neuronic energy is sent to the brain for processing.

Hi Tom,

I was under the impression that the only part of our body that can "sense" sound is the ear drum, but then what you’re saying is that since our ear drum is only part of a complex network that forms a mechanism to "sense" sound, therefore it’s possible our brain can get sound information from other than our ear drum.

So there are three options to this argument:
1. If what you said is true, then even if our ear drum can only vibrate at 20KHz max, other parts of the ear has the possibility of vibrate at higher then 20KHz. I mean our body works like a machine in that sense. You need something to vibrate at higher than 20KHz for our brain to process signal. Otherwise where would the brain get the information from?

2. But if the ONLY part of our body can vibrate is our ear drum, then I don’t see how we can sense sound at higher than 20KHz.

3. The third argument is this. Considering the equation Y = 1/x.
Y is approaching zero but never gets to absolute zero. Y will get smaller and smaller but never zero. In general that’s the nature of our analog world. Nothing is absolute zero. So our ear drum is like that. Is possible that the ear drum does not get cut off right at 20KHz, but its response after 20KHz gets smaller and smaller but just enough to be able for the brain to obtain information. And when we say "we don’t hear it", it’s our brain that "told" us that we don’t hear it, but that does not mean our brain did not process it. Think about it. If we are constantly being interrupted by supersonic sound, we would be driven to crazy. Trust me. I know. I used to have a girl friend lols.

A lot of people say that truely low bass can only be sensed, and not heard. Our whole body can be thought of as a giant ear drum but for only very low frequency. Our body can actually vibrate but only at very low frequency. So when we "hear" low bass, I guess it’s more like the sensors in our skin telling our brain about the low bass (how else would we know if somebody punched us?). In that respect, not only our ear drum can hear low bass, our entire body can hear it too.

but anybody try Acoustic BBQ speaker cables with their Thiels? I need to get some speaker cables with spade connectors (long story) and leaning towards trying these, unless someone can make a strong case for something different for less than $400. Same old requirements - less harshness in the treble, no loss of resolution or harmonics. Currently have AQ CV-8s which are the only audiophilesque speaker cables I've tried.

For high end speaker such as the Thiels, in order to bring out the best, I think you need some really decent cables.  I am using Acoustic Zen Hologram II and the sound is a lot more sure footed than some low end cables.  These can be found for about $500 here at Audiogon.