Thiel Owners

Hey guys. Have had my CS 2.4’s for many years now and have always felt they needed a bit more midbass. Well, I sent my BAT VK-3ix Preamp out for the Six-Pak modification from the factory. 

Just hooked it up, and WOW it’s like a new set of speakers. Midrange is “here” and midbass is clean and correct. Lower bass is more pronounced.  Dynamics are way better too. In fact this is the best thing I’ve done to get these speakers sounding the way I wanted. I almost don’t need the REL subwoofer!

Just curious how do you position your CS2.4?

Mine are 7ft apart center to center.
I sit about 9ft measured from the front facial.  
The back of the speakers are about 19in from the front wall.

About 7 1/2 feet apart I sit it 8 feet away and the speakers are  3 feet from the front wall

tomthiel
Do you really want to hear the crap from these dealers? It'll be painful listing their comments, but I'll try to be accurate. 
Dealer 1) Imaging and focus are not real, but created. Thiel speakers basically do sound effects and sound big and flashy but are not accurate. That dealer also criticized me for mentioning imaging and focus, stating  they're not real speaker attributes but rather sound effects created by Thiel speakers. This dealer stresses that imaging doesn't occur in concerts or real music. He also actually said that I was partially responsible for the failure of Naim's Ovator speakers because imaging wasn't a priority for them but "people like you" value those kinds fake qualities in a speaker. When I asked him what speakers he liked, he stated that he likes to listen in mono, prefers speakers that do not image and that are "in-you-face" since he likes to listen really loud. (not much comment necessary.) 
Dealer 2) Thiel speakers are very poorly designed, especially the newer models with the coax mid/tweeter which were a "disaster." The old ones were a little better. Thiels use cheap drivers made overseas, are not accurate and are not time coherent - that's all just marketing. Their sound is a mess because Jim Thiel used very complex crossovers which had no way of being phase correct and they were not really first-order crossovers anyway. 
Dealer 3) Thiel's crossovers have to be extremely complex to compensate for the poor drivers. If a speaker is so hard to drive correctly and so amp dependent, then it is a very poor design. Why would you design a speaker to go down under 2 ohms and drive amps into distortion? You're crazy wasting your money by having them repaired; there have been so many improvements in drivers and crossovers in 21 years that its time to get rid of them.
(None of those dealers were talking active or DSP.)
Interestingly I spoke to a couple previous Thiel dealers who praised the speakers and stated their regret regarding what happened to the company. I also found them to be superior dealers overall. (One of those did talk active and DSP and his setups did sound excellent IMO.) 
All of the negative dealers made their comments after I'd stated to them that I've owned various Thiel speakers for the last 32 years. I guess they feel it's OK to spread this nonsense. High-end audio is a ruthless business!  

Does anyone know of an active, dsp, phase correct/coherent speaker?  I haven't heard of one.  From what I've seen the dsp speakers use extremely steep slopes to get near perfect frequency response and low distortion.  People still don't like them.  I watched the NHT Xd system come to market and fail miserably 10+ years ago.  I asked a sales guy about a set I saw pushed aside in a store after the hype had died down and he just said they weren't good for the money.  Maybe the complex Thiel crossover is what we should be replicating digitally.  It might still take a ton of work to get right but once optimized wouldn't have the low impedance and high parts cost problems.