Thiel Owners

Prof, I agree with you. The cabinets are extraordinary in both anti-diffraction and inertness. I regard Thiel's cabinet engineering as state of the art. The approach I am taking is to investigate all areas where additional input might make improvements. Various test reports, such as John Atkinson's thorough work in Stereophile, show various resonant anomalies which I may be able to minimize with minimal cost.

The drivers are fixed and excellent. The cabinets may benefit from small tweaks. The crossovers are the main focus. New improved parts quality throughout and optional outboarding are the main impetus. We are experimenting with 4-nines foil coils in the signal-path feeds and up-sized 4-nines round wire in the shunts, Mills MRA-12 audio resistors throughout and returning to point to point layouts. This undertaking is a labor of love for me and in no way meant to disparage the existing products.

@prof i too agree with the speakers ability to disappear,  but then that has been a hallmark of the speakers since i started with them way back.one suggestion i have for those willing to experiment,  is try some of the feet from GAIA.  i liked them better than the stock feet that come with them. 

tomthiel,

I look forward to the results of your efforts!

I'm a bit gun-shy about messing with the tone of my 2.7s, but if I read some brave soul happy about upgrades I may go for it. (That is, if such upgrades become available for the 2.7).

ronkent,

I was quite interested in the GAIA for quite a while and intended on trying them with the Thiels.

However, I ended up buying some Isoacoustic Iso-pucks which I was thinking of using under my turntable platform.  I tried them under one of my Thiel speakers and didn't care for the effect - tended to make the sound a bit more flubby and less alive.  (Which could all be due only to the acoustic effects of raising the speaker - I can't be sure).

But it did dampen my enthusiasm for spending more money on the GAIA.

My speakers tend to sound best simply sitting on the floor, no spikes or risers.  I tried some other risers again - some Herbie big footers which not only add some isolation, but make them easy to shift the speaker position.  Yet again, I found raising the speakers to sound a bit less preferable to simply sitting on the floor.

I am intrigued quite a bit by the Townshend isolation base for speakers, a they are designed to isolate the speakers from the floor without raising them up, and I had terrific success using the Townsend spring-based pods for isolating my turntable (very big measurable difference with a vibration-measurement app when the pods were used under the turntable base)

I'm a bit gun-shy about messing with the tone of my 2.7s

The upgrade circuit is nearly identical to OEM. “Nearly” in that bypass caps will alter capacitance by about 1%. Otherwise all cap, inductor, and resistor values are unchanged from Jim Thiel’s circuit. The difference is a substantial upgrade in parts quality. Tom Thiel posted earlier that Jim was well aware of the benefits of higher quality parts but made his choices to optimize the performance/price curve and keep his speakers attainable for regular working folks.

But there are audible improvements for those willing to open their wallets some more, especially given the increased performance with time. Many of the parts Tom is planning for the upgrades were simply not available 10-20 years ago. I consider my CS2.4s to have excellent cabinets and, especially, drivers. But there is ample opportunity to upgrade the crossovers and get notably better SQ.

That said, Tom Thiel will be measuring the results of the upgrades to ensure that the balance is not upset in some unpredictable way.