Thiel Owners

Had a fascinating experience with the Thiel 2.7s last night.

As I’ve mentioned before, they image with a specificity like few other speakers in my experience.

Last night I was listening to the album in which the California Guitar Trio combined forces with the Montreal Guitar Trio for a live performance (album streamed from Tidal). So that is six acoustic (and sometimes electric) guitars lining the stage, close together.

The Thiels imaging was so laser precise that every one of those 6 guitars in a line were easily discernible from the one beside it! They just showed up corporeally in space and I could close my eyes and point directly to each single guitar, even during complex passages.  The images of the guitarists were not recorded up front, but are portrayed at a distance.  So the instruments are not full sized, but smaller as in further away.  This puts the guitars relatively closer to each other in terms of the demands of speaker imaging, and the Thiels literally  carved out each guitar in space where I could "see" one end and the other begin only inches away from the other.

For me this is one of the ways good imaging pays dividends - beyond the timbrel cues, he spacial specificity makes it easy to discern what any particular musician is playing in a mix. And the sensation of musicians playing in front of me is more pronounced.

(I’m definitely a "tone and dynamics first" guy, but I also require the speakers to disappear and image well to be fully satisfied spending big bucks on high end audio).

Thanks tomthiel for the update. I am anxiously waiting to hear what you come up with.

Thanks prof.  Cool to hear. For me tonal balance and realistic timbre with in a realistic soundstage makes the music mesmerizing to listen to and seems to communicate the musical message really well.

Proper imaging requires many aspects to come together, about which much has been written and we won't try to summarize. I will say that there are many ways to lose the information that results in a proper image. Cabinet effects including edge diffraction are a big deal as are lack of good transient response and even-handed timbral structure. But, in my opinion, phase coherence is the underappreciated core element. The ear-brain infers elements of space from time-arrival information along the harmonic structure. Jim's designs address that aspect extremely well. Years ago a respected reviewer took a pot shot at the Thiel (CS3 perhaps?) he was reviewing for its "ridiculous soundstage presentation". He complained that they made the classical recording seem like a birds' eye view, like he was in the rafters looking down. How silly! I sought out the recording engineer and, indeed, the mics were all hung overhead. We took that criticism as strong affirmation that we were accomplishing our goals of accurate image representation. We chose to not respond to the review, considering it bad journalistic manners and politics to call out a senior reviewer. To generalize, proper phase angle information is very spotty in recorded music. When it's right, the experience can definitely take the listener into the recording environment. Thanks for sharing, prof.