Thiel Owners


Guys-

I just scored a sweet pair of CS 2.4SE loudspeakers. Anyone else currently or previously owned this model?
Owners of the CS 2.4 or CS 2.7 are free to chime in as well. Thiel are excellent w/ both tubed or solid-state gear!

Keep me posted & Happy Listening!
jafant

Good post andy!

I don't feel competent to assess the exact contributions of phase/time coherence to what I hear with the Thiels.  And speaker designers (and experts on acoustics from what I can tell) still seem to disagree.

I can only note that my Thiels (first CS6, then CS3.7 and 2.7) share a quality of precision in imaging, a solidity and density of imaging, and a very believable natural tone for voices and instruments.

Also, the 3.7s/2.7s are the most coherent dynamic speakers I've heard.  The 3.7s in particular all the way through the bass region.  But both designs distinguish themselves in coherence in the mids and highs.  There is simply no sense of a "tweeter" in the sound from the mids.  Zero.  Sounds that traverse the tricky crossover points of the tweeter/mid driver sound perfectly whole and coherent.  

What gets interesting to me, as a nut about instrumental/vocal timbre, are how different approaches can still seem to do well.  I remember the very well regarded speaker designer, Paul Hales, saying that one reason he chose higher order crossovers instead of chasing time/phase coherence is that he felt the benefits of higher order made it easier to achieve timbral precision.  And to my ears Hales speakers, the Transcendence line in particular, excelled in exactly that aspect. 
I remember going to a CES way back and after having been in most rooms over two days I heard what sounded startlingly like a live band coming from one room.  It was the Hales room and I'll be darned if the timbre of the horns, saxes and other instruments coming through those speakers wasn't astonishingly rich, accurate and believable.  When I ended up with Hales transcendence speakers, this was their prime virtue (though I found ultimately they suffered a bit from a lack of dynamics/palpability, which the Thiels really give me).

My current favourite speaker for accurate-sounding timbral quality are the Joseph speakers.   I played a great many recordings on those speakers that I've played for years on my Thiel speakers.  I love, love, love the sound of the Thiels, but when I played for instance certain piano recordings on the Josephs, there was a hair-raising shock, the sensation of hearing a piano's timbral quality *exactly* as I'm used to when I play one, reproduced right in front of me.   

So these encounters with auditioning and owning various speakers that at the very least seem to give the Thiels a run for the money in the timbral-accuracy department, make me hesitate to conclude the only way to get such things "right" is time and phase coherence, as intuitive as the case for time/phase coherence may be.   

(Please don't throw tomatoes at me my Thiel brethren, I'm still one of you!)




One of the biggest challenges to making 1st order crossover-appropriate speakers is that the drivers need to have a considerably wider bandwidth than those typically used in higher order designs. Not any old driver will do. These are much more expensive to design, manufacture and test, and Jim worked tirelessly on improving them. Tom can comment here but from interviews I’ve read with Jim, and some of the classic Thiel product literature I still have, much effort went into those Thiel drivers, and some were originally outsourced. The CS6 was the first model that contained drivers all made in house by Thiel.

My first pair were CS7s and, stupidly, I sold them for a pair of Dynaudio Contour 2.0, thinking I was going to "downsize;" they too used 1st order crossovers but were not time/phase coherent. After less than a year, I so missed the Thiels that I traded the Dynaudios for a pair of CS6s, and later bought a pair of CS2.4s for a second system. I’m trying to find a home for the CS6s now that my space is smaller and the CS2.4s are my main speakers.

Andy: congrats on your new Thiels. Enjoy them and let me know if you have any questions about set up, placement, etc. When the imaging is locked in you will know it.

Steve
andy2

Welcome! Good to see you here- an excellent post all around. Very sweet owning (2) systems. Also good to read that your CS 2.4 speakers arrived safe and sound to your locale. Interesting that you are a speaker builder, those DIY skills are going to come in handy as beetlemania and tomthiel are working in concert on a cross-over project in conjunction with Mr. Rob Gillum due later this Fall.  Stay Tuned.

Happy Listening!
stevecham

Good to see you here and glad that you are still enjoying your CS 2.4 loudspeakers.  The CS6 does look sweet indeed. Hopefully, they will find the next home soon.  Happy Listening!
prof

Thank You for sharing your thoughts here. You are one of the very few that owned a pair of CS 2.7 and 3.7 in-house for direct comparison daily.

Absolutely! once any of these models are locked-in for imaging, you will know it immediately.  Happy Listening!