Thiel Owners

Yikes,

Had someone over auditioning a turntable I was selling.  Playing through my Thiel 2.7s.    He put on Wagner and then Also Sprach Zarathustra with a crazy amount of bass from an LP.  I was sure at one moment when the low organ peaked I heard a crackle, which I presumed came from my speakers.

Worried about damage (thank goodness I now have spare drivers!).

Though playing some dance music with really low bass afterwards, everything seems fine.

tomthiel, since you are here....do you have any hunch/insight as to whether the speakers likely survived ok given the above description?

Thanks!

this should prove interesting.   i sometimes get a crackle when i play the cut Gaia from James Taylors hourglass.   i call it the system destroyer

The most common oddity from a woofer is the bottoming of the suspension: the spider hits the basket plate. Thiel's short coil is out of harm's way from bottoming on the back plate. The voice coil adhesive is high-temperature. So, unless you overheat to the point of burning out the voice coil, most noises are transient and do no harm.

However, one can hope that your experience might help you set future limits. Drivers do burn out.

my experience with blown Thiel drivers is as follows and i have owned a set of thiel speakers since 1985 starting with the 2.0.  never have blown a woofer in all these years which is good.  Blew a midrange on a 2.2 but it was about 12 years old and i think it just failed due to nothing i did.   nothing ever with the 2.4's.  not so lucky with the 2.7's.  have replaced  3 of the coax mid/tweeter.   the first time i think it was a bad driver as it failed after 2 months.  i have been using the PS BHK 250 after the first failure and it is a very robust amp and not prone to clipping so not really sure what happened on 2 and 3.   however i keep spare mid/tweeter coaxes here just in case.