Thiel Owners

@prof
Yes, that’s fair. Richard Hardesty outlined those benefits in his review of the Vandersteen 2WQ and I considered him a highly credible reviewer. Still, at my budget I want want something that crushes it from the mid bass up. Getting quality subs like SS1s or the Vandies pretty much doubles my investment. I’m putting my money into this XO project and am happy with the 2.4 low bass even if it’s not the final word in extension or definition. 

Happy Friday! All.

Subwoofers are inherently expensive, especially at Vandy / Thiel levels of execution.

Hypothesis: The ear-brain builds its sonic interpretation from the bottom up. It infers harmonic structure and actually creates a 'phantom fundamental' if none is present in the reproduced waveform. My opinion is that the listener can be better off creating his own phantom fundamental than interpolating a scrambled waveform.

But the choices are never that simple. It's always some mixed bag.
Enter amp interaction. As mentioned above, the amp can be drained and strained by deep bass demands, especially into Thielesque low impedance loads, especially as in the CS5. An obvious remedy is bi-amping' where one channel drives the bass and the other the highs.

Thiel stepped away from the bi solution for various reasons, among which was over-all system cost-effectiveness. The customer buys 2 amps. Another was amp and/or cable mix and match - there are many ways to screw up the sound and the almost-adept-enough dealer / audiophile is skilled at doing so. We determined that the straight-forward, vastly more safe, simple and less expensive route of single inputs was the best way forward, especially given Thiel's high performance per price niche.

At this time I am exploring various bi options while providing a high-quality single input option of jumper straps of solid high purity copper with conductive grease.

Just a note to point out that if you like 3.5's otherwise, four or five of them in a room eliminates any need for a sub while anything resembling recommended surround placement generally also eliminates bass room nodes.