Thiel Owners

@solobone22

I have a pair of Bel Canto REF600M’s coming this week. Current amps are a Krell TAS and a Bryston 3BST. More as I get the new units setup and broken in.

Anyone already tried Thiels with Class D amps?

I’d be very interested in how your Thiels make out with the Bel Canto REF’s! I’m looking to get more powerful amplification for my CS3.5’s, but a part of me is struggling with the associated increases in inefficiency that a more powerful class A, class A/B or tube amp is going to bring. Don’t get me wrong...a proven vintage Krell or something from Pass is still high on my list, but trading my Audio Research gear for an all PS Audio Stellar stack (mono M700 amps, Gain Cell pre and NuWave phono pre amp/DAC/ADC) has crossed my mind as well.

Anyway, apologies for rambling a bit. Good luck with those Bel Canto’s (they have gotten rave reviews) and please do let us know what you hear.

Enjoy the music!

Arvin

beetlemania,

Thanks.

Yes the 2.7 was reviewed in a number of magazines, in the USA, Europe and Asia.

Some here:

https://hometheaterhifi.com/reviews/speaker/floor-standing/thiel-cs2-7-floorstanding-speaker/

Absolute sound (made the cover):

http://www.hificlub.pl/sites/default/files/marki/broszury/cs_2.7_the_absolute_sound.pdf

Europe:

http://www.hifitimereview.com/thiel-2-7-english/

Asia:

https://translate.google.ca/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&...=

Owner manual, info:

https://soundapproach.com/pdfs/CS2.7.pdf

@prof thanks for those links. No wonder I never saw those reviews. I haven’t read TAS in years, their credibility is near zero, IMO. And hometheaterhifi is not one I look for.

I didn’t read all of those links but they do say that the sides are plywood (that veneer job must be interesting) and that the baffle is 3” but without specifying the material. Hard to imagine that thickness would be any other than MDF.

Tom has an idea to identify cabinet surfaces with resonance issues but I was unsuccessful at helping him with my setup.

The side walls of the 2.7 are a smaller clip of the actual 3.7 panels, composed of multiple woods in assymetric layup with constrained layers - a technical tour-de-force for some high-buck brands to drool over. Thiel vacuum bagged the finish veneers, which they laid up in-house,  onto those panels in-house. Past tense seems a little weird. Curved walls geometrically resist standing wave resonance. Great idea, very difficult to make work. Imagine aligning everything for assembly!

The 3" baffle is MDF - which is nicely internally damped and pretty ideal except for the less than rigid driver recoil-launch characteristics, which I am addressing with penetrating hardener in and around the driver-mount recesses. No end to the fun.

Thanks for the 2.7 review leads. It is peculiar that Stereophile never reviewed it. The Thiel Audio company was sold within months of the 2.7 release, which may have broken the long-running history of mutual appreciation between Thiel and Stereophile. From the very beginning, Stereophile appreciated our efforts and consistently validated our results. I consider the review journals as among the best allies one could dream of.

prof - congratulations on your turntable isolation. Speakers add to the difficulty of managing isolation, the control of driver recoil and reflection-vibration, but without the luxury of isolating them from the cabinet which also serves as their spatial reference. Driver bounce reduces sonic incision.

You picked good materials for your isolation bases. Among woods, the maples have high internal damping which increases as frequencies descend, which is unusual and helpful in your situation. If your annual rings were running vertically (turntable-floor) then you minimized the sonically transmissive structures in the wood. As I mentioned, MDF is nicely damped. Two different thickness is a very good idea. By adding the SS bottom, you set up a wildly different resonance scheme, causing an impedance mis-match which serves to damp transmission. And because of the high tensile modulus of the steel, you turned the whole sandwich into an assymetric beam in bending (assuming the SS  is fixed to the MDF.) Materials with very different characteristics and dimensions works wonders.

Cheers

I just heard that Thiel is in bankruptcy