Thiel Owners

This discussion makes me feel nostalgic of the younger years.  Oh well time has to move on.  

@tomthiel Thanks for the counter narrative on the TAD reference speakers. Very interesting.

The Hales line was perhaps(?) another example of a faux coherent speaker line. Their cabinets featured concrete baffles that were sloped similarly to Thiel's. I auditioned a pair at the other audiophile store in town before deciding to buy my 2.2s. When I told the salesman I was impressed with Thiel speakers, he brought out the Hales, pointed out the sloped design, and told me they were like Thiel speakers except the concrete baffles made them better. They completely lacked the realism that sold me on the 2.2s, so I moved on.

Maybe it was the salesman more than Hales that misrepresented them as being similar to Thiels –– I never bothered to look at the Hales sales literature. Apparently, Hales used a sealed cabinet for tighter bass and touted flat frequency response as their main selling point. They used fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley crossover networks.

There's a (mostly) enthusiastic thread on Hales speakers here: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/hales-design-group-speakers-how-good-were-they. But it's much shorter than this thread; so there!

ish_mail,

As I've mentioned somewhere earlier on the thread, I owned the Hales Transcendence 5 speakers, and still own a the Hales Transcendence 1 monitors and center channel, which do duty in my home theater and for occasional music listening.  In fact, I own an extra double of each of those speakers just in case I blow a driver, which tells you I'm quite a fan.

The Hales speakers, to my ears, are excellent for midrange/tweeter coherence, smoothness, timbral warmth and accuracy, with a very low sense of "grain" to the sound, and really spectacular soundstaging.

What they miss for me is the density and solidity of the Thiel sound and imaging, and the sense of texture I hear from the Thiels.  (Hales sounding just a tad smoothed over).

But I absolutely adore the Hales in home theater duty because they combined clarity, timbral warmth and transient precision, with a very relaxed presentation.  Good for me since I often come to movie viewing in my home theater after a long day of doing sound effects, so I don't really want to be beaten around by an aggressively dynamic sound. 

Just an FYI:
3.5 Electronic Bass Equalizer listed on Goodwill auction site, current price $16

https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Item/59297127

iambenbryant
Nice catch! Good to see you again. How are you enjoying your CS 2.7 loudspeakers?  Happy Listening!