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

^Kudos to them for using a neutral environment. Too bad they don't measure at distances that allow for proper driver integration, time accuracy or actual listening positions.


The problem of measurement distance is well understood by those educated in the art. In other words, the measurers do not think that their 50" or 80" measurements present an accurate performance picture of a multi-driver phase coherent speaker. But their limitations are real. Reflections in real rooms overwhelm the actual signal, so they must bracket the time window of their quasi anechoic measurements to eliminate the reflection - noise. And they publish their results in the name of 'level playing field' - all products subjected to the same test, despite its known shortcomings.

Collateral damage includes:

•  Bad (compromised) information is in some ways more harmful than no information. Real anechoic chamber or outdoor measurements are expensive and Stereophile et al choose to side-step that expense without, in my opinion, proper contextualization / education for their readers.
• The normal reader does not have the education / information to extrapolate the real meaning from the compromised measurements.
• It is impolite for manufacturers to raise such issues in print, thereby becoming complicit in the misleading measurements.
• Many manufacturers design to measure well in the Stereophile-type quasi-anechoic measurements, rather than a justified standard.
• There are no firm rules for record producers. They are second-guessing how a loudspeaker (without standards) might reproduce their mix.
• A vagueness cycle (neither viscous nor virtuous) ensues.

And stuff like that. Note that the ear-brain, adept at synthesizing (remembering) how a real (insert instrument here) bass, etc. would sound in this playback room, (and should have sounded in that recording space - remember, we construct what we hear) can judge the more correct representation when given comparative choices. We at Thiel decided, at the beginning, that the only justifiable approach (to our understanding) was to design to anechoic-flat, just as a microphone is designed to anechoic-flat, except when it's not because Shure et al think that singers want to enhance their upper midrange formant. And the slippery slope gets slipperier and slipperier. I notice that there is more agreement now than 20-30 years ago about what is more correct. But, has there ever been an attempt by the Society of Audio Recording Engineers (and so forth) to standardize the design goal of the loudspeaker? Wouldn't that be a worthy undertaking? And the beat goes on - Amen.
Too bad they don't measure at distances that allow for proper driver integration, time accuracy or actual listening positions.
Most Thiels measured by Stereophile (at 50") show a suck out at the mid-tweeter XO point. Sometimes the text would explain that this was likely a problem of distance and sometimes not (but kudos to them for even trying!).
Soundstage measures at 2 m, about 79". If the CS2.4 was disadvantaged in their test you can't tell by the "listening window" graph. +/- 2 dB from about 33-20K! I've only noticed one other speaker in their database that can match that! (A $$$$ Magico - no thanks)
Tom,
How did Thiel measure speakers, and what type of facilities did Thiel have for measuring speakers?  Thanks.