Thiel Owners

@tomic601: "How they measure is hyper important IF the art is to move forward"

I agree 100% with this when it comes to any and all speaker designers, manufacturers and researchers. Most of the real progress has come from individuals and/or companies with both the insight and the access to, or creation of, SOTA measurement gear.  Uh, Thiel for example :-)

My point was that the majority of those who purchase the end-product have little background to make sense of a manufacturer's (usually) minimal published specifications, or interpret the one or two independent lab tests, if they even exist for the speaker under purchase consideration.
  
There's the small minority of us here who do have a clue about the measurements' relevance, but all of us will have to admit they don't substitute for how any speaker sounds in a particular acoustic with all the combinations of upstream hardware.

@sdecker agree :-) so few home audiophiles have an spl meter and a DMM and test tones for level matching, so lots of tail chasing going on

@solobone22  I went the ARC route ( REF5SE but the Aesthetix has it’s many virtues. I have Jim Whites DAC. 
Jim

Regarding measurements - some of you have probably seen Jim's setup. It was home-brew, but quite extensive. Of interest is that the swept sine wave told more about some aspects, and his "bleeper" which was 1/3 octave tone-bursts, told different aspects more clearly, and pink noise again a different shade of meaning. He correlated these chamber tests with outdoor normal plane and ground plane and up-firing from the sand pit. Part of his witches' brew was how he weighed and rolled with all those variants. When we went to the listening room, he would spread out graphs so that he and we could correlate different aspects with what we heard . . and make progress decisions.

Of note is that when New Thiel took over, they trashed Jim's gear and replaced it with a Klippel rig. Rob now has that rig, but neither of us has approached it yet.

tomic601
Nice score on the Ref5SE. A very fine pre-amp that I have heard several times. Mates well with solid state or tubed power amp(s).
Happy Listening!