Thiel Owners

Hi Tom,

I managed to track down the previous owner of my 3.5’s, which I bought from a vintage audio dealer/repair shop. He was the second owner, having moved on from them to 3.7’s. He is also the original owner of CS5’s that make up his big-room system. He’s also has a pair of 2.3’s in his basement. He’s a frequent lurker of this thread. 

Anyway, you’ve professed quite a few times of your love for the 3.5’s. The reason I bring this up because this gentleman also told me that he misses very much the 3.5’s sound...that, to him, they have a different character from other Thiel designs/models. He likened it to the 3.5’s having a wide tolerance for genres...it was a speaker that played everything very well. 

If I may ask, what about the 3.5’s make you love them so? Because, while I LOVE my 3.5’s and have built my system around them, I often wonder what I would get by moving to a bigger Thiel? 

Thanks for all your wonderful input on this thread...

Arvin

arvincastro
Thank You for the story behind your 3.5 loudspeakers. Ask your friend/dealer to join us here.  Hope you are well and enjoying Fall.
Happy Listening!

This answer may be a little lame - but here it goes anyhow. Note that I have been away for decades and my personal experience listening to music through a robust system ended with the 3.5 and the following 2.2. Now I have PowerPoints and 2.2s and have heard a few systems when visiting folks. So my experience is rather dated. But it was full-emersion / intense.
So my reason for loving the 3.5 is personal. I was intimately involved in its development, parts sourcing, voicing, manufacture and tweaking. Those 3D baffles were all hand-carved by . . . moi and an assistant, in an amazing hand of man effective method . . . and then tooled on a vintage inverted router (souped up with an 8" diameter forming tool that I designed. You get the picture, full frontal engagement. The fiber (silk, paper) upper drivers do not have the resolution of metal, but they are more forgiving. The woofer was our first polypropylene and we custom designed the cone profile for significant breakup improvement. The caps in the 3.5 were Solen when Solen was using their own best-in-world French film. The micro bypasses were 1% styrene x tin foil. Lots of tweaking and voicing and audiophile sensibilities. Later products lost that last level of detail due to cost / value engineering. There just wasn't enough improvement for the considerable extra cost. Also the newer metal drivers changed the cost / performance equation again and caps suffered - inserting a little vague jangle, in my opinion. I have always locked on bass authenticity from my musician and recording days of youth. The 3.5 sealed bass has a rightness from the very bottom that just doesn't quite bloom with reflex bass. OK, the reflex bass hits all the adjectives better - tight, punchy, etc. and plays more than twice as loud. But the sealed bass of the 3.5 and 5, digging lower than the recording, somehow lights my fire more naturally.

To your question. New Thiel models and generations always mitigated the problems of the previous generation and improved everything they addressed, within the limits of balanced performance. I think a newer, bigger model would almost always please more people more often. Try to audition some.

The gist of my quest is to resurrect some of the old models which can be had at bargain prices and apply lessons and technologies to make them shine brighter than they ever did, and brighter than so many other contenders that don't deliver the full, broad, complete parameters that Thiel brought to light. I hope to conjure those last ineffable nuances of music. Love is a personal thing.

tomthiel
Never lame in any reply!  The 3.5 is still beloved in 2018 and your hard work, labor of love, proves this fact.  I must report that spending all of these years in the Audio forums, (2) models are at the top of the Thiel catalog.

The 3.5 and CS 2.4 loudspeakers. And for excellent reasons- I can certainly vouch for the 2.4, not having heard, the 3.5 model.  I concur about sealed Bass enclosures, when executed the right way, very musically pleasing than any other cabinet design. Natural Bass is the flip-side of this particular coin to me as well. Nothing like it. Keep up the commentary and correspondence here as your time permits. I value your input, always!
Happy Listening!

I'm curious about the ultimate performance speaker box.  There's no way I'd ever spend 50k or more on a pair of speakers but I wonder if there are other, far cheaper ways to build the ultimate box out of readily available materials.  There was a company that made their boxes out of layers stacked on top of each other with gaskets in between.  The material used was some sort of epoxy I think.  There were rods that ran from top to bottom that held it together and were screwed tight.  It seems like something along those lines could be made fairly easily and the pieces could be made as thick as necessary to control vibrations.  Heck, you could build the baffle and then make the rest of the box out of bricks.  Put a platform with wheels on the floor and hire a mason to build the rest to spec.  It could be curved or whatever shape you want.  There'd certainly be no low frequency vibration there and higher frequencies could be managed fairly easily I'd think.  Might end up looking really cool too.  It wouldn't be very portable but might very well achieve ultimate performance.  I have too much stuff floating around in my head and not enough time to play.