Thiel Owners

Rob,

I’m glad you enjoyed my ramblings on the Thiels. At one point I rambled in an online hi fi mag reviewing speakers (many years ago) so I’ve had a lot in my listening room. I drifted away somewhat from the hobby for a while (turning to designing my home theater room among other things). Still, both back then and now I have enough contact within the community to hear amazing gear.

I keep experimenting, modifying the positions of the 2.7s and find I can get them sounding almost however I want - smooth and lush, brighter more dynamic or a mix in between.

Right now I’ve dialed them to where they sound just super clear with incredible transient response, yet with a warm inviting timbre. Playing something like P. Glass’s Powaqquatsi with it’s ever changing layers of percussion sounds so exciting and life-like, the exact character of every different drum, block or triangle so vivid.

Like I said, I’ll miss the 3.7s scale, but the 2.7s portray more rhythmic drive and conjure sonic images with more solidity than anything else I’ve yet heard. So they are to my ears very much a “performance-first” speaker where the lively sense of musicians performing is the overall effect vs other speakers where soundstaging/spaciousness may leave the overriding impression.

ronkent,

Thanks for the REL recommendation. I used to be more familiar with that line years ago and they were my first thought.
However I’m in a situation where some room features rule out anything but very small subwoofers and the size/performance ratio of the JL Subwoofers I chose are tough to beat.

As I think I may have detailed earlier in the thread, the JL subs, though generally made to use the rca line ins also offer a high level speaker input - ala REL - and as that was easiest I started taking the feed off my 2.7
speaker posts.

Though I got some of the subwoofer benefits - larger, deeper sound - I also lost dynamics and the tone of the system went too dark/soft/rolled off.

i don’t know why (and I’m mostly a newbie with subwoofers as I’ve usually hated subs).

I tried using the rca inputs as well (sent from my preamp) and while it was a bit more dynamic the tone of the system changed too dark. In both cases this was running the 2.7s full range with a low crossover point.

JL Audio’s position, and that of most of the subwoofer aficionados I’ve read, is to go with the crossover and split the sub/mains, usually around 80hz. So that’s my next move. (I bought JL Audios high end analogue crossover).

We used a variety of amps in the lab and listening room. Threshold, Mark Levinson, Krell and Classé were always there. Unsound may be right about the TH12e, I don't remember. The Classe´amps were a pair of DR9s strapped to mono, which I still have, have hot-rodded and use every day. Their stereo rating is 8/4/2=100/200/400 and mono is 400/800/1100. An amazing thing to me is driving a pair of PowerPoint 1.2s, sealed box home theatre monitors rated at 89 db/w-m with 75 Hz cutoff into an easy room at "normal" playback levels . . . have you guessed? Their performance jumped a big notch going from stereo to mono with these amps. MUSIC IS TRANSIENT and impact requires power. These PPs are my mix and room monitors with stereo SmartSubs. (I'm still looking for a beat-up SS-2 or SW1). When people suggest your Thiels are sounding conjested on complex / demanding music, look to your amplifier.

An endemic design problem is second-guessing. If an amp designer assumes that low-impedance loads will be narrow-band / reactive, lasting instantaneous / short durations, then he can sign off on the particulars of his power supply. However, Thiel (and some other) speakers assume that a properly designed amp can deliver its rated output into resistive (easy) loads for longer term cycles (hard). The amp with enough power supply will love that load. The wimpy supply will starve the rails, clip the peaks, generally sound hashy and burn out drivers. I personally examined hundreds of burned-out Thiel drivers over my years (1975-1995) and every single one failed due to heat which means they were fed dirty signal. Conversely, over all the years of our listening and testing at well over 100dB (large) room levels, we NEVER burned out or otherwise failed a single driver. The specialty retailer and review magazines are supposed to do the educating, but that education is quite thin, in my opinion.

Jon, fiberglas is the cost effective standard. I tested and love genuine wool. Its naturally spiraled fiber works magic in converting pressure-motion to heat. We used 2 grades of SAE military pure wool felt on the back cabinet wall of the midrange enclosures to absorb the back-wave. Wool's performance can't be equalled by modern materials, which I call wishful engineering products. Wool fiber has a couple of problems in the cabinet. It acts very differently than fiberglas, so don't just replace the FG with Wool. And wool is inconsistent, so every cabinet would have to be trial-and-error optimized, which doesn't work well in a production environment. It is also hydroscopic (absorbs water in humid environments) and it's expensive. I will consider it if/ when we get to ultra-upgrade prospects, but wool must be re-engineered, not merely substituted.

Well, I don't think I listen THAT loud -- we were listening to the 2nd Beethoven piano concerto this weekend, it's got very quiet passages with just a few instruments, and then full orchestra passages. Our room's 20 x 21, speakers are 5 feet away from the wall. My Alpha DAC digital volume was 38, fed directly into the amp. So, not earsplitting! But the small ensemble music is very nice, great imaging, timbres, etc., and as I wrote, the climaxes seem a little "scrunched."  I've had the 3.7s for three months. before that the 2.2s. Nice speakers, also.

I blew a mid on my 3.7s listening to Beethoven.  It's just so crankable.  I was underpowered at the time.  I added a second amp and run bridged mono now with around 7-800w/channel into 4 ohms and haven't had a problem since.  That was about 6 years ago.

Arvin - about the missing CS4. By the late 80s, we had gotten well established in Japan, which is (or at least was) extremely difficult as well as being a world market-maker. They wanted a state of the art speaker from Thiel, and orientals don't have "NO" in their vocabulary. Seriously. Those days were filled with newly-minted companies like Hales, Wilson, etc. offering $20K+ speakers. The late 80s were the good old days. Jim, however, was an incremental knowledge-based designer and had an aversion to jumping leagues, even though it would have injected significant and much needed cash. So, he designed his next greatest speaker beyond the 3.5. Of course the model naturally begged for the CS4 title. Well, it turns out that the entire orient considers 4 to be the number of death. Of course, our sophisticated distributor and dealers were above such superstitions, but cautioned that we must be concerned about all those other guys who may not want the sign of death in their homes.

The work-around was that the 3-series was a 3-way. The new speaker was a 5-way and therefore could leap-frog the pesky 4 problem and become the CS5, which it did. Now, the next product under development was the Thiel developed and manufactured coax product. I thought it should be a 4-way: coax to 6.5" to 10 or 12" plus passive, etc. However the 4 slot had been leapfrogged and the orient hadn't abandoned their 4 problem, so the 3-way coax x 12" became the CS6. Hmmm . . . lesser than the CS5. You guys will notice that CS6 driver complement is similar to where the 3.7 landed. Luckily for me, I had left the company during the development of what became the CS6, so I didn't have to lose sleep over these pesky matters.

In my opinion, had Thiel's new 20112 owners chosen to stay on the Real Thiel Way, a CS4 could have been a stellar performer and bridge the way to a CS5.2 as described earlier with SS bass. The CS6's primary limit is the 12" handing off to the 4" coax. Put a 6.5" in between and some serious seamlessness wow could happen. Of course you guys know this configuration as the CS7 series . . . It all got kinda confused by that skipped 4. In my imaginary life, I would have persuaded the new Thiel owners to develop the CS4 as a 4-way plus perhaps an exotic bass system between the passive radiator of the 2.7 and 3.7 and the powered inboard subwoofers of the CS5.2 (remember that from a previous post?). That imaginary CS4 bass got some passing fantasy time, but never made it to development. Imagine a true folded horn nestled between the floor joists, fed by a fitted opening on the cabinet bottom through the floor, and exiting via a floor grille in front of the cabinet . . . Yes, it requires build-in. Real life gets in the way.

Next time we'll walk down memory lane where no one has ever snooped and find the mighty Thiel folded horn heard a mile away.