Thiel Owners
andy2 - perhaps cable conductive stabilization is beyond the scope of this forum. But I would nonetheless like to post how such considerations entered the awareness in the development of Thiel Audio's peculiar relationship to the role of the loudspeaker as a precision playback device. Discomfort is a requirement for growth. I may have mentioned cousin Teddy awhile back, but to recap: he helped us appreciate the much larger world of science beyond armchair comfort with known basic concepts. Our cousin Ted Lyon was a senior theoretical physicist at General Electric Jet Engines in Cincinnati. Teddy was smart. Teddy also took an early interest in what we were doing with speakers. He first came to visit in the throes of prototyping the O3 to be phase coherent or not. (. . . to be, that is the question - sorry, I'm involved with a mentoring Shakespeare Company and couldn't help myself.) Our problem was that myriad sonic problems beyond our understanding invaded the sound-scape when phase coherent (first order) and vanished when not phase coherent (3rd order). We knew we had a tiger by the tail because musical nuance would also be higher as a result of such functioning when phase coherent. Teddy listened intently and nudged our conversation ever more far-fetched and speculative, far beyond what we as 20 somethings could comprehend. But Teddy was a patient teacher. After many hours and near exasperation he simply began to talk - for perhaps a half-hour. We learned that NASA had faced such exasperation in its long-field (millions of miles) aerospace avionics - instrumentation / transceiver communication. The communication and especially navigation-positional protocols depended on transient waveform integrity. He said he was hearing artifacts in our phase coherent prototype similar to what he heard in his avionics prototyping work. He offered 3 avenues for our exploration. Replace steel driver baskets with non-magnetic alloys to reduce eddy currents, upgrade the copper wire, and never evaluate "young" components. It bears noting that Jon Dahlquist of DQ-10 fame came from aerospace and that he used 18ga twisted pair solid copper in teflon when the rest of the industry used ordinary stranded wire. Hmmm. My summer of 1977 revolved around identifying and sourcing wire and other components that ended up being 99.9999% pure, long crystal, low oxygen, etc. in teflon or varnish from ITT, developed for NASA. As far as I know, we introduced "wire" to the audio industry, or at least we didn't hear about "wire" from anyone else beyond noting Dahlquist's unusual choice. Let's proceed to "never evaluate young components", which included wire, caps, resistors - everything. Teddy said that the grain boundaries in metals conducted non-linearly with frequency, current, voltage, temperature and so forth. Boundary effect phase discrepancies were certainly measurable and in fact the subject of considerable engineering effort - thus the ITT wire. Furthermore, those grain boundaries could (speculatively at that time) exhibit migratory properties, since ionic flow tends to push and form metallic micro-structures, which are somewhat mobile. Our breakthrough involved learning how many things that we did not understand could have effects on what we were hearing. So I suspend my own tyranny of intellect when relating to sonic phenomena. The gig goes: hear it, label some aspects in non-value terms (never use better or worse), isolate some aspect, address that aspect from different angles, note the outcomes. Choose a couple to measure, find or develop some meaningful measurement criteria, decide which path to pursue. Nowhere in this decision tree must we prove to anyone the validity of our reasoning or selection. The decisions must lead toward improvement by our own criteria and that of our customers, including reviewers and peers. It would take lifetimes to explicate and/or prove such matters, which would not promote designing speakers or building a company. So, I claim no proof for much of anything. I am merely stating my bias toward creative intuitive action. Here is a link to an abstract chosen off the web. It represents the kind of stuff I read that summer and informed my conversations with Teddy. I doubt that we would have jumped into the deep end without Teddy's input. Jim was thoroughly committed to the scientific method with a deep dose of skepticism. Teddy was a serious PhD who encouraged and insisted on exploring beyond the limits of understanding. He gave me significant encouragement and Jim the basic permission he needed to trust his ears. https://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/meetings/PDFplus/fus Enjoy. Tom |
