Thiel Owners

Wow Beetlemania, you're my kind of audiophile. The few times I posted similar details, and the proper test engineering of listening and evaluating each set of changes, then ranking them, I've been met with crickets. As such, my post you're responding to was minimal.

I do have 0.1uF bypass Multicaps across all three ESAs, and my 13uF coax series is a 10uF || 3uF ESA. (These are in addition to the Lexington Elpacs I mentioned that remain in place) I'm sure there are all variety of better caps by now that improve on both CSA and ESA; that ship has sailed.

Fair point to replace the electrolytics due to loose tolerances and drift. I'll look into the coils and order the resistors. Thiel supplied me with the schematic for the HF XO, but don't have one for the LF XO, though it should be simple enough to figure out. Anyone who has that diagram I'd appreciate it in a PM.

Does anyone know about the changes to the 2.4 woofer that were apparently made after my speakers were manufactured?

@tmsrdg
ERSE sells direct erseaudio.com , 
I've also found that partsconnexion has the best prices when you wait for their sales and the best sellection for USA postage ,
HiFi collection is another great source but with higher postage rates .

@beetlemania

Thanks ,  I looked at images of 2.4 crossovers , interesting thing is that they all look like circut board material while I thought that Thiel was using a masonite type board like those used in my 2.7's .
But if you look at images of 2.7 you'll see that they look more like circuit board material and I think are demonstrator models .
What is your board material made of ? 

@sdecker PM sent

@vair68robert  As Tom Thiel wrote just days ago, FST PCBs are on fiberglass. Classic Thiel used point to point connections, with leads mechanically twisted before soldering, on Masonite. That is what I have on my hot-rodded CS2.4.

Rob - Thiel's homegrown boards were all masonite. The show boards were masonite sanded and painted to look cool. Asian imported boards were all fiberglas. It is possible there were transition boards, but I've not heard of them.
The 2.7 was made entirely in-house in Lexington under management of the first New Thiel team who sought to return to roots. New Thiel ownership changed leadership 5 times in the 5 years they ran it. Team 2 abandoned Jim's design approach and took all manufacture to Asia.

As far as I know, if yours has a masonite board, it also has components refined through time for best cost-performance.

FWIW - I spent about 6 months in intensive wire learning and comparisons last year. I felt connected to that exploration since I had researched and selected the original wire for the 03, Thiel's first phase coherent speaker in 1978. Thiel stayed with that wire and its successors throughout Original Thiel. It is CDA101 (5-9s, long crystal, oxygen free) in teflon, tight twist (originally 2 / inch, then 3/ inch. Originally we bought from ITT, the aerospace developer of the wire. When StraightWire began, they took over the audio marketing of that wire. Its successors served Thiel onward as well as many other manufacturers. Note that FST boards have a similar-looking wire, but it is CDA102 (next grade down) with sometimes less tight and tidy twisting in a less than teflon jacket.

In my re-investigation I sampled Cardas and various offerings of various configurations in various jackets. We listened blind, and I compared a suite of 8 measurements of each wire. Although I don't have definitive tests, our listening paralleled what seemed to be superior measurements. Most of the artifacts of various "lesser" wires occur below 20Hz and above 20kHz. But a sonic signature persists in audibility. Across brands and insulation type, stranded wire has a "forgiving" signature with an appealing bloom in the bass, with a bit of soft tizziness in the upper end. I would call it nice and warm. Solid wire, regardless of other factors, sounds comparatively simple, straightforward and lean. Somewhat counterintuitively, the high end sounds cleaner and more solid than stranded.
I cross-checked my findings with Stevem Hill at Straightwire who cross-checked our mutual observations and hypotheses with his physicist associates. I always incorporate what I study and strive to understand with what I hear, beginning with blind listening and progressing through a reduction of possibilities toward a small handful of contenders that sound good and measure well. That has always been a Thiel hallmark, we never choose "nice sounding" if there is evidence of technical glitches.

My solution uses a combination of 18 solid and 18 stranded in a particular twist. It behaves extremely well on the scope and in the listening room. I am hand-laying my own working samples, but at some time it will become available through Straightwire.

As a general rule, you can assume that anything you get from Rob at CSS is actual Thiel OEM, and that anything connected to an FST (glass) board is an Asian clone. In all cases I have found the Asian clones to be quite good, but a step down from Thiel OEM.

There is a lot more to wire than can be measured with capacitance, resistance, and inductance. Electromagnetic propagation interactions, electrolytic absorption and wire crystaline anatomy all do things. Some among us hear artifacts from those things. Some in the engineering arena think we're crazy. But in all cases that I have gotten a straight-ahead engineer to listen, they agree that there is something going on. Steve Hill thinks they can't admit what they hear because their understandings of the processes don't account for the differences. Therein lies the gate to audiophildom: we believe it matters if we can hear it, and the cognitive understandings must follow from the heard experience.