Thiel Owners

vair68robert

No- the other Audio forums send a maintenance notice well in advance reporting that the site goes down for said amount of days, times.

I follow all of the sites listed on dailyaudiophile.com on a very regular basis. Audiogon appears to have a different interaction, look and operating platform in comparison.  An exact location here in the USA and its server(s) locale would be of interest to me.

Listening to the CS2.4 and comparing to my own speakers I notice a couple of things.  The CS2.4 like most Thiel speakers use concentric tweeter midrange driver.   And because of that, the soundstage is very stable.  I can move my head but the sound remains constant most of the time.  
There are not a lot of quality off the shelf concentric drivers available commercially and those that are available are not of high quality.  So my speakers use separate dome tweeter and midrange driver.  Since I build my own speakers, I could afford very high end capacitor.
When I listen to Jewel song 2 Find U on her album 0304 on my speakers, there is this treble glow that sort of being sprinkled over the soundstage that is kind of addictive.  It's like the golden glow over the atmosphere you see during a sunset at the beach.  I use the track above as an example but on my speakers this treble glow is there in every track.  I mention that because I use very expensive cap in my tweeter cross over, but when I put in a low cost cap the glow was greatly diminished.
When listening to the same track above on the CS2.4, I notice that treble glow was not really there.  So I was wondering if the CS2.4 might not have used a good cap?  Or it could be the concentric tweeter midrange driver is a compromise to achieve time-phase coherent?
Also, some time-phase coherent designs use a phase delay network on the tweeter, and the phase delay network uses up 2 capacitors per network so if you want to use high end capacitors it will cost a lot of money especially for a commercial design.  I don't know how the CS2.4 xover is designed so I am not sure.

As for the CS2.4SE version, from what I heard, the xover was modified to use more expensive capacitors, and some people have said that the SE version sounds sweeter than the regular version so maybe it's the capacitor that is responsible for the treble glow.  My speakers tweeter is ScanSpeak AirCir soft dome tweeter where as the CS2.4 uses aluminum so that could explain the difference as well as soft dome is known to have a sweeter sound vs. aluminum.

Anyway, back to the concentric tweeter midrange driver.  Theoretically I always knew that concentric driver has the advantage as far as soundstage presentation stability and coherent and having a bigger sweet spot.  Now that I can personally listen to the CS2.4 in my own home, I am more than convinced that it's the way to go if you want a good soundstage presentation.  Earlier Thiel speakers used separate tweeter and midrange driver.  But later designs, all Thiel designs have all used concentric drivers so I guess he came to the same conclusion. 

The problem of concentric is the motor design.  Basically you need to have a motor that have to drive both the tweeter and the midrange, hence you have to compromise.  Not only that, when the midrange driver vibrates, it modulates the tweeter as well so it's another thing you have to take care off.  If you have to separate tweeter and midrange driver, you can optimize separately to your heart's content.

I have seen a few concentric drivers available commercially but their frequency response do leave a lot to be desired.  In that sense I admire what Thiel have done.  They have gone their own way and I wish more speakers manufacturers could take a bit more risks.

Ok, so it seems the site is buggy for others.  Good to know, thanks.

andy2,

Very interesting post.  Thanks. 

I know what you mean about the "sparkle" that some speakers may have (in this case yours) vs the Thiel sound, and certainly agree on the advantages of the concentric mid/tweeter design.

I wonder if you have heard the last, re-designed version of Thiels concentric mid/tweeter in the 3.7 or 2.7 speaker?

I was familiar with previous Thiel speakers (including having had the Thiel CS6 for quite a while with it's concentric design) and the 3.7 design, with that new flattened, corrugated mid and new tweeter, was really another step ahead, both in terms of smoothness, clarity, and coherency.

I have auditioned a great many speakers and heard too many to count over my fervid audiophile career, and I've simply never heard a more coherent speaker top to bottom, but especially in the mid/upper frequencies.   It's impossible to hear any crossover or discontinuity, just a perfectly whole, seamless presentation.   Every time I came home from auditioning highly lauded, latest greatest speakers (including new Magico and others) one of the first things that stuck out is how the Thiels made those other speakers sound less coherent.

Same for soundstaging.  As you mention, I really enjoy how consistent the sound is from the Thiels from a wide variety of listening positions.  That to me is a very natural aspect of sound.   If a speaker starts to sound phasey, or really shifts tone/imaging quickly with listening position, that's a turn off to me.   

I'd draw an analogy to TV technology.   When plasma displays and LED displays were battling it out, I had the same issue with LED lit displays, as their image altered in contrast/color noticeably with any shifts of the viewer off axis, which gave it a a "shifty" quality to the presentation.  Plasma, being emissive light source was completely even and stable, so it produced a beautiful, consistent  image from any reasonable angle.
An image of a painting on a plasma would be akin to what it's like to view the real painting, insofar as you could walk around and examine it from whatever angle you wanted.

Whereas LCD, especially in previous incarnations (and still to some degree today), had a shifty quality which made it more like those "hologram art" pieces, where you have to stand in just the right position for the illusion to work, which instantly identifies it as artificial.

I get the same issue with really fussy speakers.  It's one of the reasons why I don't care for most electrostatic speakers, especially Martin Logan.  ML have long claimed they have mitigated the "head in a vice" electrostatic problem by curving their panels.  But whenever I listen to ML speakers I still hear the same issue.  Move my head and the image quickly slides in to one speaker side.  Whereas with my Thiels, while of course there is a sweet spot for the stereo illusion, it's wider and tonally there isn't some obvious change with listening position which make it feel lessy fussy, more natural, and more realistic over a wider listening area.

And as Andy says, the Thiel design is fantastic with soundstaging and imaging specificity.  The 3.7s were just about the best soundstaging/imaging speakers I've ever heard, at least from a conventional box design (only my MBL omnis exceed them in some ways).

Though of course now I live with the 2.7s.

In my long "speaker auditioning" thread on A-gon, I mention a lot of speakers I auditioned, and every time I came home I'd spin the same tracks on the 2.7s and one of the first thing that would impress me (aside from the beautiful tone) was the soundstaging and imagine.  The Thiel soundstage is huge, the imaging dense and palpable.  Playing live concert recordings especially had the sense of expansiveness and being at a concert.

As I've mentioned in the thread before, one of the performance advantages I heard from the bigger 3.7s over the 2.7s, is that the 3.7s imaged more consistently across the whole soundstage, speaker to speaker, so even instruments panned hard left or right floated distinctly apart from the speakers.  I find that less so with the 2.7 design, where instruments to the sides tend to sound a bit more 'coming from that speaker' than the big Thiels.  

I also get the sparkle thing Andy spoke about.  Depending on how I position my Thiels I DO get a beautiful sparkly golden tone in the upper frequencies.   But it's more of a consistent "glow" over the whole spectrum.  There isn't ever a sense of the upper frequencies "sticking out."  It's very inviting.  But on some other speakers the design can seem to add a bit of additional sparkle to the upper frequencies that can be appealing as well.  It's one of the thing that appealed to me with the Joseph and Devore speakers.  It makes, for instance, picked acoustic guitars sound more vibrant and present.  I don't mind it if that character doesn't sacrifice too much in the way of coherence, and it's a nice place to visit, sonically.