Thiel Owners

stevecham
I, for one, would like to see you return to Thiel Audio loudspeakers.
Happy Listening!

The conclusion from some of the previous discussions is that concentric drivers with the tweeter located coaxially mounted within the midrange driver is the best way to achieve a more consistent soundstage.  Some have commented on the Meadowlarks and pre-concentric Thiel speakers to have a sound that is sensitive to listening position.  I am very puzzled that we don't have any good concentric drivers available on the market.  If Thiel could do it, I don't see why either ScanSpeak or Seas could not.

In my own design, with separate tweeter and midrange, the sound balance is also sensitive to listening position.  There is one way to fix this is to lower the xover frequency from the tweeter to the midrange so that the dispersion characteristics of the midrange and tweeter are more evenly match.  The problem is the tweeter has to play lower so that could add to tweeter distortion.  Some of the new tweeters from ScanSpeak could play lower but the less expensive tweeters may not be.

This affect is more prominent with first order filter vs. higher order filter design.  

andy2
excellent points all around. Absolutely! ScanSpeak, Seas and Vifa could build such drivers- why those guys chose not to do so, I do not know?
Happy Listening!

All - lots of good information. Bottom line is that most of those who try are prone to fail. An underlying cause is that coherent transducers are roughly an order of magnitude more difficult.

Andy asks why more manufacturers don't "do it". Short answer is because they can't afford to solve all the problems for the very limited market to pay for the development costs.

Case in point - Thiel Audio. We began with customized drivers from the usual manufacturers: Seas, ScanSpeak, Dynaudio, Vifa and others. Early on we forged a relationship with Vifa where Thiel developed what it wanted / needed and Vifa prototyped and eventually produced it. We got favored customer status and they got to put it in their catalog for anyone to buy.  The other manufacturers were not as adventuresome, preferring to make their own designs with less expense for larger market share. Our drivers were inherently expensive with bigger magnets, tighter specs, more critical surrounds and spiders, etc. It worked for both of us. Good partnership.

Except that we wanted to go beyond their comfort zone for some of the reasons Andy mentions. So by the 1990s we were deep into prototyping our own drivers and sourcing parts from speaker manufacturers and other industrial sources. By the mid 90s we had to make our own drivers from scratch to get what we needed.

There are no "good" concentric drivers on the market because most of them end up in car or home cinema uses with lower budgets and expectations. It would be hard for you to imagine the effort that went into Thiel developing its own driver-making capability, not because we wanted to, but because we wanted to build speakers beyond what the supply market could deliver to a demand market which doesn't require the rigors of broad bandwidth, high-performance drivers.

Regarding the prior thread of other coherent manufacturers, and why there aren't more. A case study that applies broadly is the "New Thiel". Ownership hired folks who cared about preserving whatever Thiel was doing, who hired among others Mark Mason formerly of PSB - smart and talented design engineer. It fell to him to prove to ownership and management why coherence matters. Fact is, that task is nearly impossible. They collectively decided to put their eggs in the same basket as everyone else and make very good "normal" speakers. 5 stars from Stereophile, etc. But, who cared? There are myriad good normal speakers. Unique vision lost. Company failed.

So why did Thiel take on the awesome task of making coherent speakers? Why do very few others succeed at it? I've said that it is hard and expensive - so why do it? I have previously shared how we looked at many topologies and possibilities of where to spend our efforts. Here are a couple examples of how we landed on coherence as a requirement.

The cats.
The farm / commune always had animals. The cats ruled the interior space. The living room was the test room. One of our test sources was a simple (no effects) recording I made of nature sounds, including wind in the bushes . . . and birds. The cats never cared much what we were doing. But during a session of 1st vs 2nd vs 3rd order slopes - Precious, the energetic black cat, scrambled up the speaker and took out the tweeter while it played twittering birds in the bushes. Hmmm. The 'cat effect' joined with the 'leaf effect' as unique signposts along the road to coherence.

The leaf effect occurred when we hauled the experimental 03 about 20' high into the Walnut tree in the side yard for outdoor anechoic-free-field measurements. (Poor man's anechoic chamber) We got differing measurements for unexplained reasons that turned out to be summer leaves vs autumn leaves vs bare winter branches. Score one for my daughter to decipher the cause! But, another thing became evident. The sound of the wind in the leaves and branches made sonic sense with a coherent transducer whereas we dismissed it as noise with higher order slopes. Very, very interesting.

There are other examples. I may have mentioned the teenage girl effect and the passerby-neighbor effect. We became convinced enough to surmount our skepticism and challenges of courage. We knew it would be intensely difficult to pull off coherence, but we chose to do it because we believed it mattered.

Notice that in the general industry narrative, they conclude that it doesn't matter enough to pay for the troubles. That opinion dominates. From 1978 onward, we never lost faith, and that term is what the skeptical scientist would apply to it. The Canadian Research Council proved to the New Thiel owners that coherence could not be heard. Most manufacturers believe it can't be heard. Thiel's dedication to the aspect of coherence is a matter of belief when viewed from a scientific perspective. And it isn't like Thiel's dogged pursuit proved anything. The world still says it doesn't matter.

But some folks, from previously unexposed novices to high-end recordists, "get it". Once they do, they generally don't let go, even though some aspects of smoothness and dynamic range are inherently compromised by the factors required for coherence. Nothing is free. Thiel chose to chip away at all the aspects and continually develop solutions to all the elements brought to bear by opening Pandora's Box.

I doubt that Thiel, as a fledgling, internally capitalized company, would have continued just making 'normal' speakers. It didn't matter enough in a marketplace inundated with companies already doing that. But there was something about the truth of the musical experience that fanned our flames, that kept us going for what turned out to be 35 years and would have been as long as Jim was able to keep making progress toward his vision of the complete loudspeaker. Thank you all on this forum for 'getting it', for honoring the decades of work that went into augmenting this obscure corner of the playback experience . . . 'for the Love of Music'