Thiel Owners

That was an absolutely fascinating read, Tom.  Thank you!

I'd followed Thiel for years, and especially when I was on the hunt for 3.7s in 2015 and afterward, I was fascinated with the story of Thiel's history...and it's demise at the hands of new owners - delving through all the Thiel articles and comments on Thiel at the time.


It's hard to think of any other high end figure who garnered so much sincere admiration and good will from writers, industry folk and audiophiles, as Jim Thiel.

Prof - I began my re-acquaintance with Thiel Audio when Jim died in 2009 which increased when the company sold in 2013 and more so when New Thiel ceased operations earlier this year. I agree with your assessment of appreciation. However, in my fairly extensive reading I am struck by how little the actual scope and accomplishment of the work is known.

Jim was very self-effacing and introverted and did not effuse, as I have been doing in this thread. And the company didn't spend effort on promotion or advertising and didn't develop liaisons which might have focused the understanding and value of the work more than the somewhat superficial understanding generated by reviews.

Flashing forward a few decades, I believe that phase-time will be revered in speakers much like it is today through the audio production chain from capture, right up to the speaker where it is commonly accepted that the ear-brain can descramble the signal well enough. Life is short and we leave very little mark. But what a trip!

Thanks to Tom for recapturing all the works went into the measurement phase.  That seems like a lot of works.  I supposed that was before the proliferation of personal computers?

I think today speaker designers probably have a lot easier time with speaker design with the advance of software and inexpensive access to computation.  Some of the software are actually free and can be downloaded into your personal computers.  I personally only spent about $270.00 and able to purchased a set of hardware that can perform all the measurements needed to speaker design.  All the softwares that I am using are completely free and available on the internet.  The rest is up to my own imagination.

As for measurement distant, I think the problem with making measuring at 8ft distant is that by the time the sound arrives at the microphone, you have a lot of sound reflection from the floor, the side walls of the measurement room.  You could put a time bracket so you can only capture the sound at a very narrow time window before the reflections but that would compromise the low frequency portion.  The longer the measurement distant, the narrower the time window, and hence the lower frequency response compromise.  You could correct for that by measuring at closer distant such as 1 meter which is industrial standard.  The problem is with first order speakers, at that distant, the mid and tweeter may not fully integrated so that is another challenge.  Or you could build a large chamber so the floor and side walls distant is a lot longer than 8ft.  Another problem is at low frequency, the wavelength is so long that you need a very large chamber so that you can accurately capture the one wavelength of low bass frequency before reflection.  Tom mentioned that Thiel was trying to measure the speakers outdoor with the speakers mounted on a tree to eliminate reflection from the ground so I guess it had to be a pretty high tree :-).  Eventually it may not be practical to build such a large chamber so there are a few methods of trying to merge the high frequency and low frequency response.  There are software that could do this but they seem to have their own limitation.

But I think you could make it as complicated as you want, or you could simplify as much as you could to get a finish product.

So I did my comparison today, the bryston 3bst and 7bst in parallel and serial on my Thiel 3.7. As both amps are off the same generation, they sound sonically identically. I used some jazz music, with organ and sax (domnerus, antiphone blues) and Brubeck, take five. First observation: the spl of the 3bst and 7bst in parallel were the same so comparing both in mono was very easy. Second observation: at 80 dB, what I consider at live loudness, both Amps were easily able to reproduce the music as I was seated 12 feet away. The only difference I could consistently detect was in the low bass where the 7bst was fuller. Any differences in the upper range, was undetectable by me, no signs of any distortion. 3. But then I played some female vocals, brendi carlille, and there it was, her voice was deeper on the 7bst and sharper on the 3bst. Enough of a difference to keep the 7bst.