Thiel Owners

Right On! Tom,
Good to see you today.  While we are mentioning names, Audio Video Excellence in Raleigh NC had Thiel Audio. I was impressed with Ryan Deans at the helm whom is / was adamant about his loudspeakers. This is the Audio shop where I spent several months with the CS 2.4SE, CS 2.7 and CS 3.7 models in audition. It was a fun experience and experiment sifting through those models in an attempt to find the one for me.I chose the CS 2.4SE as the best performer to my ears. My listening room is not large enough to accommodate the CS 3.7 loudspeaker properly.Ryan's fave was the CS 2.4SE as well. He would not sell his pair to me- smart on his behalf. This was back in the Fall of 2014. It would take searching weekly to find another pair of this model until January of 2016.I acted quickly and made the trek to Austin TX, without reservation, to purchase. Turned out to be a slam dunk, double reverse. Now, to decide on the rest of my gear...
Happy Listening!

Good dealers are a treasure! That world is generally fading in the rear-view mirror of Crutchfield, Amazon, ebay and so forth. I bet you will love the 2.4SS (just playing-whatever it will be called).

Now, back to amps. As you know, my reference amps are old classic Classe. Fine amps, hotrodded, drive the Thiels fine, especially a pair of them. Etc. But I need a second amp for proof of upgrade work; I have special considerations beyond my own enjoyment.

Jim judged that the amp's limitations are the amp-maker's problems. Logical enough - except for the consumer who had to spend 5x his speaker price for the right amps, which bucks pretty much . . . everything. As you would expect, I have been surveying the amp world for some solution for driving Thiel speakers with even higher resolution than the originals. That's a double-edged sword . . . wonderful when the signal is great, and even more revealing of trouble when less than great.

I have appreciated your amp leads. I have also investigated the PS Audio BHK-300s, Ayre and other heavy hitters. I don't want to fall into Jim's trap of designing with the stellar amps, which leaves most listeners with less than best or even objectionable performance. What to do? I would like the group's feedback on the following possibility.

Benchmark straddles the fence between pro and audiophile. Their stuff is very clean, neutral, transparent and relatively affordable for its performance level. They now have a power amp, the AHB-2, a hybrid AB amp powered by a class H power supply and class A feed-forward error correction amp. Intriguing concept. The high end pros rave about it. Its measurements are stellar. I am inclined to try it for several reasons, one of which is that it is a marginal player facing the new world with a different vision. Flashing forward 20 years, I want the Thiel HotRods to be sonically viable without requiring Krell, Levinson or similar heavy iron.

The AHB-2 breaks my double-down rule, but only a little and on technicalities. Class H is a switching power supply (which break down when past their current limit). At 100 watts / channel - 8 ohms, it is only marginally adequate. It is precisely that marginality which attracts me. I want to explore that limit of great performance with shallow pockets. Benchmark engineering is analyzing the Thiel loads to make a technical assessment. I admire their approach and there are Thiel fans at Benchmark. Their vision reads like Thiel promotion of my dreams. (I feel that Thiel never promoted itself very effectively.) I am specifically investigating stereo-amp, monobloc-strapped, and vertical bi-amp configurations. The latter would assign one channel of a stereo amp to the bass and the other to everything else. So much to learn.

Anyhow, do any of you have experience with this amp? Or do any of you have thoughts or opinions about my ideas? I would appreciate your feedback.

 

@prof I too am sorry for your setback and wish you a thorough recovery.

I would add Technical Audio Devices (TAD) Reference Series as another product line whose design shares many of the same goals with Thiel but with a cost-no-object market strategy. These are crazy expensive speakers even at used prices. TAD’s concentric Coherent Source Transducers and slanted baffles should be familiar to Thiel enthusiasts. A TAS review http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/tad-reference-one-loudspeaker-tas-218-1/ describes the crossovers as "asymmetrical [with] non-classic shapes", possibly similar to Thiel crossovers which are acoustically (not electrically) first-order.

I heard a pair of Reference One floor standers http://www.technicalaudiodevices.com/reference/ at an early (first?) Axpona sourced with a master copy reel-to-reel tape of John Lennon solo. It was spooky real. I was running Thiel 2.2s at the time, and had not yet upgraded to 3.7s, treated my room, added subs and a Thiel SI-1 crossover, or upgraded most of the rest of my system. At the time, the TAD system was far and away the most convincing music reproduction I’d ever heard. It was long ago and a different room, so I can’t reliably compare it to my current system. But I can say the gap is much smaller now.

On Thiel dealers: My sales rep in one of two high-end dealers near me was a doctoral student studying voice in our Music department in the mid 1990s. He was quite knowledgeable about audio and sold me on a Classé / Thiel system. I’ve stuck with those two brands ever since with no regrets.

Ish - TAD makes great speakers, thoroughly engineered with world-class materials, at very high prices. The have a strong following in pro and audiophile worlds. I was very impressed with the ones I heard.

However, they are neither time nor phase coherent. See Stereophile's measurements:
https://www.stereophile.com/content/tad-micro-evolution-one-loudspeaker-measurements

The verbiage surrounding tilt and assymetrical slopes is to lead one to believe that all fronts have been addressed. I do not dispute that excellent sound can be heard through non-coherent transducers. Thiel coined the Coherent Source phrase to mean "Minimum Phase - Time Coherent wavefront". TAD does not meet that definition, nor does KEF, B&W and others who suggest that they do. I would not put them on andy-2's list.