Thiel Owners

jon - a little history might help. Thiel's original balance was -2dB shelf below 200 from anechoic flat to compensate for room gain. Purist, first-principle approach. However, 40 years ago there was little marketplace agreement of what constituted flat, and Thiel was often called 'bright' - we were lighter than the BBC / Advent, etc. broad 100Hz bass bump. Over time, our interpretation has become standard. The 2.2 had historically the richest bass due to better room coupling of the passive radiator than either the previous ports or single-driver sealed enclosures.

I am experimenting with adding a little midrange to the hot-rodded 2.2 balance to align it closer to other Thiel designs. It conveniently has a midrange series resistor for straightforward tweaking. 

Good to see you, prof! Your Vivid experience dovetails with Andy's "image density" query. My perspective is complex and deep and would take a book to explore. But in its simplest form, the 'reality factor' and 'image density' issues revolve around how the ear hears.

We make it up. Hearing is a synthetic activity of very high order. That mental process requires significant cognitive processing (which is why closed eyes help!). All that cognitive processing serves to decouple the experiencing-listener from the real-direct aural experience. A major part of that cognitive processing is the brain reconstructing the aural meaning from signals which have had their phase-time information compromised. So, I don't think that Andy or anyone else can get 'it' without first-order alignments which preserve phase-time. Once it's scrambled, work is required to guess the meaning.

Being a synthetic process, hearing benefits from all the cues and clues it can get. So all the other elements such as edge diffraction, panel resonance, component and thermal distortion, etc. all matter. The more that is 'right', the better we can hear - synthesize a meaningful aural experience. 

I investigated the Vivid speakers. They are seriously competent. But I can't find anything about their filter alignments; I strongly suspect they are higher order, whereby they can more easily solve all the other design aspects and produce convincing music. Prof, I suspect you are particularly attuned to phase-time element. When the ear doesn't have to perform that aspect of sonic reconstruction, things seem more real. Because they are.

Thiel attempted to tame the dragon, to wrestle with all the elements that became even more aurally important when correct phase-time was preserved. Sane engineers and business consultants all say 'don't go there'. The current consensus is that 'there' either doesn't matter or it's not worth the effort. I appreciate the regard you all have for Thiel speakers because for you what we did was worthwhile. It matters to we few.

I found Stereophile reviews of Vivid products. John Atkinson - Giya. Indeed they use high-order filters with concomitant wavefront delays from each driver. Common wisdom considers this temporal distortion to be OK / non-hearable. I agree that the hearing brain can reconstruct the sonic deconstruction reliably and well. But, I also believe that on an emotional-involvement level such reconstruction activity removes the whole person from the well-recorded sonic event.

One thing I hope we can all agree on is that live music, or any live sound for that matter, is, by definition, phase-time correct. From the moment we try to capture that music or those sounds on any recorded medium, phase-time takes a hit, if ever so slightly. Those speaker designers who knew, from both an intuitive and engineering standpoint, that it mattered by doing the least amount of harm to an already compromised signal, were on the track for phase-time accurate, in-home music reproduction. As I’ve written several times here in other threads, our auditory system evolved to be acute in its time-domain sensitivity purely for reasons of survival. Studies have been performed, but we really don’t know the absolute time-resolution limits for directional cues resulting from differential arrival times between our two ears. And, it turns out, pressure receptors in our skin have some ability to detect these time domain elements as well; some directional perception comes not only from our ears. From what I’ve read in the peer-reviewed literature, the human ear can tell the direction of a 90 degree side-presented, 1500 Hz pulse of 660 microseconds (or 0.660 milliseconds). Most speakers cannot even accurately resolve that timeframe when subjected to step-response measurements; those that can are phase-time correct. This is a clear case where objective design, measurements and bioacoustic science merge to create a subjective advantage.

About 15 years ago, when downsizing my system from CS7.0 (which I loved!) to go to a pair of Dynaudio speakers, that experiment lasted less than a year before I purchased a new pair of CS6s. I have now found a home for these due to yet again more downsizing, but my 2.4s are indeed keepers.

I'd also mention the Vivid speaker frankly looked and felt cheaper than my Thiel 2.7s (or my previous 3.7s, or the CS6s).   There has always been an obvious pride of build quality that came through Thiel speakers, which translates IMO in to a pride of ownership.