I have to say I was made so anxious reading the news about Thiel last night I actually had trouble sleeping until I found out whether Rob would still be servicing/providing drivers.
I’ve spent all too much time agonizing over which Thiels to keep, and I’ve spent a ton of money on subwoofers, crossovers, digital eqs etc to try to integrate them with the 2.7s. (I should be doing a good test of this sytem this weekend). Given all this, I want to feel secure that I’m building a system around speakers that will be with me a long time, and that can be fixed, in particular if a driver fails. The reports of the coax driver being fairly susceptible to this worried me more. I just didn’t want to live on the edge, having to treat the speakers with the fear of one bad move...and that’s it.
So having the spare drivers available really makes all the difference to my peace of mind.
It was the same with my Hales speakers that I use for my home theater.
Paul Hales wielded absolute magic with his design, the smoothest most organic sound I’d ever heard from metal drivers (and still right up there).
No speaker managed to make home theater listening so easy and smooth while crystal clear, that I could find. Yet by the time I wanted Hales for my system, they’d gone out of business (my timing is perfect!).
I managed to find one of the few remaining pair of T1 Transcendence monitors, and an incredibly rare (huge) top of their line Transcendence center channel made to match the transcendence line. It was just heaven to listen to. But...at any moment a driver could go and that would be it.
So I kept my eye out for another pair of T1s just in case and somehow ended up talking to Paul Hales himself, who sold me the last remaining pair that he’d been using in his office!
Since then I’ve tracked down two spares for the even more rare center channel (they made very few). One complete commercial one, and also the template version - raw MDF no finish - Hales used for to quality check voicing of the other transcendence center channels.
Yes..a bit obsessive about it ;-)
But, the result is having speakers I don’t ever intend to replace in my home theater, and being able to relax about the possibility of failures down the road.
I’ll certainly be stocking up on the Thiel drivers.
(BTW, the fella I'm most envious of is a guy I know who ended up with, what for Hales fans, is the mythical unicorn: The Hales Alexandria. It was a new go-for-broke design, the single pair they displayed at a CES, which disappeared because Hales went under shortly after that. Reports were that the sound was magical. I can't believe anyone managed to snag those!).
