Thiel Owners

jon_5912 - I wholeheartedly agree. Jim not only was a master of his design craft, he applied tons of time to evaluating each component to identify where costs could be shaved without sacrificing performance. His performance / cost ratio was amazingly high - there's nothing superfluous and nothing dragging down the net result.

To put some practicals around that, in his last years, Thiel looked long and hard for someone to take on his role in the company. Serious, multi-pronged search, to no avail. One big disconnect was finding anyone who 'got' the time-phase coherence thing to the point of cooperating, Another was finding someone willing to slog through the value engineering. It would be easy to double the cost with very little performance advancement.

thieliste - I don't think so. The only components of real concern are the electrolytic caps. Thiel used high-performance, high-temperature, long-life Ecaps with a normal use horizon of 40 years. 'Normal' is a slippery target, but Rob has said the only failed caps he's seen are in conjunction with mis-use of some king. 

You have bypassed 3x100uF 'lytics in the midrange resonance shunt. You also have a bypassed 75uF 'lytic in the tweeter shunt circuit. Replacing that one with a good PP would probably produce some sonic upgrade.

There were 2 revisions for the 3.7, rev1: 12jan08, rev2: 9dec08. So yours would be final form.

Excellent guidance and information for CS 3.7 loudspeakers, Guys.

Happy Listening!

Enjoy Record Store Day -All

@improvedsound - what a lovely playback system you have! I am honored to have Thiel speakers in such sophisticated company. I'm not sure how much knowledge there is about Antelope and Merging in the American hi-fi marketplace. I love them from the world of high-end recording. I especially appreciate the Merging converter due to its roots in the Nagra DAT technology, which I used heavily around Y2K when high resolution audio was in its infancy. We chose 24bit/ 88.2kHz because Redbook 44.1kHz rendered more cleanly with the simple 2X math. Anyhow, I love your gear and wish that you might talk about how you approached your 2.4 upgrade, what you learned and what you achieved. Thank you.