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Thiel Owners

Guys-

I just scored a sweet pair of CS 2.4SE loudspeakers. Anyone else currently or previously owned this model?
Owners of the CS 2.4 or CS 2.7 are free to chime in as well. Thiel are excellent w/ both tubed or solid-state gear!

Keep me posted & Happy Listening!
128x128jafant
jon_5912
601 posts
 
I think having products for home theater and also some very expensive, high margin products is a good idea.  Home theater especially should be active and the crossovers should be digital.  that would allow for user selectable crossover slopes which would be cool.  You want to watch an action movie, select 4th order and crank it up.  For drama you bump it down to 1st order for maximum realism.  There would need to be preprogrammed EQ overlays of the crossover to handle driver response imperfections.  Keep the traditional Thiel line for people who prefer analog or who already have electronics and just need speakers.  I definitely agree that there were some directions the company could've been taken that would have had a far greater chance of success than trying to charge 6k for 3k worth of PSB speakers.  

I think I'm ready to dive in and attempt to build a speaker box for a kit.  I'm planning on buying the Zaph|Audio SR71 kit from Madisound.  What I want to try is make the back and sides out of strips of 3/4" mdf.  They will stack on top of each other in the corners, leaving horizontal 3/4" gaps along the flat parts of the box.  I'll drill holes in the corners through all of the boards and run 1/4" threaded rod to hold them in place.  The sides and back will connect with an effective hinge at this point so I can lay the whole thing out flat and pour concrete in the gaps.  That will result in the walls being half concrete and half mdf.  I'll hold it together by tightening bolts to the threaded rod running through the corners and also through the sides in places.  It's hard to explain and I can't find an illustrative picture.  Ultimately I hope to have no wall flex typical of mdf, minimal high frequency ringing from the concrete, reasonable weight, and low materials cost.  This is my first try so we'll see how I do.  
thielrules
160 posts
 
Tom, glad to hear you have thought of a way to continue to service the mid drivers for the 3.5. I hope that Rob will find new cones and coils when his current supply runs out
These ideas about possible new developments with Thiel become more realistic if we can obtain the rights.
tomthiel's avatar
tomthiel
1,669 posts
 
Great ideas, guys.

jon - I highly recommend checking out USG Hydrostone instead of concrete, for reasons I've previously enumerated.

rule - someone has to pick up the ball, I'll do my part.

andy - good ideas. I suggest that Thiel's present driver technologies are world-class and viable. The likely buyers for those patents are FST, Thiel's Chinese supplier and Meiloon, New Thiel's Taiwanese supplier. Whoever buys those patents would have a big jump on the kinds of products you envision. I would add pro-audio to the mix. Create the music with Thiel monitors.

By the way 24bit x 192kHz digital is now feasible and wow does it work. Also, active crossovers are readily executable in analog for the purist products. A visionary partnering company capable of producing the controlled amps is key. New Thiel also developed some seminal digital technologies. For the right buyer, the Thiel intellectual property is likely to be a huge bargain.
tomthiel's avatar
tomthiel
1,669 posts
 
Regarding theater:
I know a universe where the audio dimension of theater adds a profoundly deeper and more complete involvement to the video. As coherence enters that total immersion world, serious magic happens.

(Little known factoid: Thiel worked with IMAX and Skywalker Ranch with hugely promising potential. But, Thiel was not a collaborator in that league. My daughter Dawn grew up inside the company. After Jim's death she said "Thiel Audio wasn't a real company, it existed so that Jim could design speakers and have a life." (Same girl who defined the 'leaf effect'.) Bottom line: Coherence is huge in theater playback and Thiel has technologies and know-how to take that niche over the top. George Lucas et al spend untold resources keeping every ounce of phase/time relationship intact through triple digit track counts and processing paths. I vote that we shortchange ourselves by saying it's OK to scramble it at the end. 

Now, imagine the CS4 (ever notice it's absence?)

unsound
7,327 posts
 

I don't think one has to forgo classic Thiel virtues to attract the HT crowd. The concentric drivers lend themselves to it.The more recent models might be adapted to the more recent HT formats. Imagine another concentric driver mounted on top of the 3.7's dome? Some of the most expensive budgets spent on sound is by Hollywood. I believe one of the reasons HT hasn't attracted that many audiophiles ( expense  aside) is the fact that most of them realize that properly placing two channels is challenging enough adding another 3 to 5 or more is daunting, if not impossible.

I've touched upon this before, but let me bring it up again. If like Thiel the objective is to get everything off the recording as accurately as possible to the listener, no matter how much attention is paid to the system chain the room itself will ultimately impose the biggest hurdles. One way to help ameliorate the problem is with DSP. I suspect that one of the problems with using DSP in the past is that direct sound from the loudspeaker to the listener and the reflected sound from the loudspeaker to the room to the listener has been convoluted. While is it has been estimated that 80% of the sound one typically hears is room reflected (and therefore corrupted), we know that given sufficient time delay (estimates vary from about 5-8 milliseconds, which loudspeakers placed well away from the walls will provide) listeners ear/brains will prioritize the initial direct sound from the loudspeakers over that of the reverberated room influenced sound. That might(?) be fine for symmetrically placed two channel systems, but such symmetry might well be impossible in typical listening environments for multi-channel (and perhaps preferably so for other reasons) but what was once not much filtering/processing on the ear brain has now become greater in amount and more complex from varying room influences. The problem with DSP in typical room set up is that when correcting for the secondary distorted room influence, one ends up correcting the primary direct sound from loudspeaker sound as well. That can become quite unnatural to the listener and especially more so to those listeners not in the sweet spot! 

Keep in mind that many recordings already have their original room influence on the recording, now with typical loudspeaker setup we're adding/superimposing more. That might be best be described as distortion. And with HT/multichannel setups distortions that varies from channel position. That's a lot of ear/brain filtering/processing, which might become fatiguing. One way to offset this myriad of convolutions is to minimize them. If the loudspeakers baffle is very close to room walls, then direct sound and reflected sound become more of one, and then the DSP room corrected sound and the reflected sound become more of one and the same, with no or little imperceptible timing issues.

The advantages of such loudspeaker placement becomes more evident in multichannel and HT, especially so now that flat screen monitors/screens are fairly standard with their lack (or close to it) of projecting boxes that previously added side reflections. Placing five to seven channels 3-5 feet will into the listening room with 16-20  feet across from themselves (which would provide 8-10 feet from loudspeaker to listener) would require huge rooms (and perhaps a bevy of potential tripping speaker cables) not readily available to the typical consumers.

Obviously having the loudspeakers close to the room walls could have decorating advantages that can't be undervalued in the marketplace. With such wall placement, perhaps less labor and money(!) might be placed on cabinet beauty. The downside might be an increase in baffle area to compensate for box volume losses. I have some ideas for such a baffle box, but I've probably taken up to much space already. Still, I suspect that such box reduction costs might be somewhat passed on to the consumer for ultimate multichannel affordability and commercial competitiveness.

On some level Thiel has been doing just this for years and with great advantage with their concentric drivers(!), think Powerpoint, Dewdrop, etc.., just without the DSP possibilities.

 







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