Rosami - your dealer feedback is helpful. I am working on understanding the marketplace having been away for 20+ years.
I know you know, but I'll say:
There is no faking, but there is elucidation. There is lots of residue on a recording that the producer doesn't hear. Thiel illuminates, which is both blessing and bane.
The complex crossover is a burden. Indeed, all those parts introduce a veil and must be very high quality to produce the result. Thus our current work.
Thiel drivers have always been very expensive. I vividly remember when the big W hit the scene and their woofer was half the cost of one we had rejected for our smallest 6.5" two way. Their product retailed for 10X as much. We outgrew commercial drivers because the best Danish custom houses were unwilling to do the extra work and precision for our demands.
The test for time coherence is a square wave or impulse over the entire range. If the wave-form keeps its integrity, then the job is being done. The same information is in impedance or phase plots, but you have to know more to read those.
Active speakers have a lot going for them. DSP wears multiple hats. It is inexpensive and versatile. But great digital conversion is rare. Most DSP results in some form of digititis, and actually can't solve the fundamental filter issues without compromises.
All the way back to the beginning - our greatest work before launching the Model O1, was Jim's development of an internally amplified, actively controlled speaker. That prototype was crude, and who knows, may have been surreptitiously rescued from the New Thiel Dumpster Frenzie. Given larger company scope and budgets, active speakers is where Thiel wanted to go.
Jon - I know of no active / DSP, etc. speaker that is minimum phase / time aligned. The big problem is drivers that can handle the band-width. Jim Thiel spent a lifetime incrementally developing such drivers. And remember, the scientific community broadly agrees that coherence is irrelevant because the human ear-brain is good enough at reconstituting the compromised timing information. Steep slopes sequester the scramble to narrow bands which therefore have less information and can be more readily ignored. The present darling is 4th order Linkwitz-Riley filters because the undisciplined mind can pretend that 360° phase shift, (one full cycle of phase delay) is somehow equal to 0°, unless you think about it. Our approach is a purist one: faithfully capture all aspects of all the forms of information presented at the input terminals.
Anyhow, the matter of authentic signal reproduction is a matter of extreme esoterica. Most people aren't wired to notice or care.
