Thiel Owners

unsound - point taken. Sealed box bass is more phase correct. I like it too. The brutally low impedance of the CS5 deep bass might be ameliorated by a separate amp for the bottom end. Also there is the matter of those huge analog bucket brigade time delay lines for the lower and upper midrange drivers - even with very high quality caps, there is a hypothetical veil.  I wanted a geometric solution of concave driver plane mounting. But small companies can only pull so much out of their collective sleeve under real-time development budgets and schedules. Fact is: Jim was enamored with the bucket brigade delay which he had independently "invented" before learning it was already 'out there'. And he didn't accept any down-side beyond cost. CS5.2? 

Do you have an amp to drive the CS5 well?

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I, too, had an audition w/ TAD (floorstander around $30K retail a few years ago) and was disappointed. Especially for that kind of money? The rest of the gear- Esoteric DV-60, Pass Labs XP-10 preamp, Threshold T-400 and Aesthetix Atlas power amps, Silent Source / Signal Cable / Wireworld Electra Silver power cords all around. The room was really tight and dead silent in nature. Still, I preferred a Thiel loudspeaker strictly for it's rich timbre to my ears.

Happy Listening!

Tom,

Yes, those 7.2s sure are rare on the used market.   Whenever one showed up on audigon or wherever, I'd get melancholy.  They were something of a dream speaker for me and used prices were affordable.  But their size has always precluded a purchase.  The size of the CS6s when I had them long ago unfortunately pushed just past the boundaries of acceptable in my room, in terms of aesthetics, which is why I didn't keep them.  It's not a big room and once a speaker gets too large for a room I find the aesthetics awkward.

But that's an entirely different question vs whether large speakers can work in small rooms.  I've had full range floor-standing speakers, flat to 20 Hz, that worked great in my room and I've heard some big speakers work well in other even smaller rooms.  (The CS6 sounded amazing in my room too).

I'll have a pair of 2.7 coming next week so cant wait to hear these puppies.  Never owned Thiel before but a local buddy has the 3.7 and I love them. Will drive them with either a BAT VK55 or Mark Levinson 27.5. I'm sure the 27.5 will control the speaker best since it's 4 ohm  but the VK55 will sound sweeter.  

Thanks sharing that interesting history regarding Thiel and Vandersteen dealers, Tom. I’ve read most of those journals Hardesty wrote and edited and he was certainly a fan of both brands (and not a fan of Wilsons, Pipedreams, etc). You might look to his writings for amplification ideas. He was a fan of ARC and Ayre - hey, so am I - and I recall he liked VTL among tubed electronics.

I’ve heard both the CS7.2 and 3.7 but in different rooms and different electronics plus a few years apart. I cannot pick a winner but both were extraordinary, just below the very best I’ve heard (but at a fraction of the price). I probably sound like a broken record here but I think Tom Thiel’s XO upgrade could bring both models into that next tier.