Thiel Owners

Prof, welcome to the final destination on the ride.

Ha! I know myself too well to think I’ve settled on my last and only speaker. I’m polygamous with speakers.

As I’ve said: my Thiels are so wonderful overall I really can’t imagine ever selling them. I’d truly end up kicking myself. So if I get new speakers it will be in addition to the Thiels, not replacing them.

As per my previous report: I listened to a fantastic Chet Baker album, featuring beautifully recorded trumpet, sax and flute, at my pal’s place, and then later spun it at home. The clarity at my pal’s place was extremely impressive. But at home on the Thiels (and CJ amps) it wasn’t only clear, the trump and sax were so much bigger, richer, had more realistic weight and presence and that elusive organic quality.

Joni Mitchell singing on Blue at my pal’s place was, again, impressively clear, but it wasn’t a human being: just a bunch of "super detail" where her voice seemed sort of disembodied and taken apart in the sound field.At home the Thiels focused all the sound so it all sounded like it was coming from the same place, a person in between the speakers, with body, roundness, appropriate softness, sibilance sounding like breath not like an electronic artifact, etc.

Nice job, @holco 
a second confirmation that Thiel performance can be elevated to the next tier by better passive parts. TBF, the parts I have were not available when the 2.4 was introduced. And if they were, they might have nearly doubled the retail price! I think Tom is working on a solution that gets most of the SQ I’m hearing but for less money. But final costs may be influenced depending on whether you have Lexington or FST boards. 

beatlemania,Thanks :)

I realize that the investment I made (> € 750) is not really realistic with a new loudspeaker of €5000 (bought them for €1600), but it is amazing how eagerly the CS2.4 appreciates the parts!!
I have had many (Magnapan, Kharma, Audiostatic, Kef, Oragle-Helicon, Red Rose Music, Aurum Cantus, Scansonic, etc etc) loudspeakers and I usually improve the crossovers because there is usually a lot to be gained but there is no one that comes even close to this Thiel loudspeaker :)

Wish Jim Thiel was still alive so I could shake his hands with respect!!

Btw, I found a date of my CS2.4

https://www1.picturepush.com/photo/a/16097433/1024/Thiel-CS-2.4/20190119-164001.jpg

Holco - nice work and thank you. Please remind me of your serial numbers for my reconstruction records. FYI: part of the reason for the "eager appreciation" is that the other parameters are all designed for maximum performance. The driver motor distortions are less than 1/10th of anything else I have seen. And the dual cone driver has extremely low breakup and the cabinet has very low resonsnces, and so forth. In addition, I believe that phase coherence allows the aural brain to accept the signal as real rather than reproduced and as such the essence of the music is accessible to the entire sensing / feeling person. You have removed a veil and you can experience the improvements holistically.

As a historical note, Thiel budgeted $1/3 for cabinet, $1/3 drivers, and $1/3 crossover. That formula gives more budget to the crossover than most companies commit, but our requirements are high. A large portion of that high cost is in high-purity copper and the styrene x tin foil 1uF bypass caps. And the other parts were also carefully chosen within their budget constraints.  A company must second-guess its way to its target market, and this particular cost-performance plateau is where we struck our claim. Also, the ultra audio grade parts we have today were not available ten or twenty years ago.

Here's a Sunday Morning Flight of Fantasy from the memory bank. About 1990 with the CS2.2 and a hefty hand-full of new products in the pipeline, I speculated about an opportunity to reach a different market. The company didn't want to go that way, mainly because of the confusion it might create. But here's a sketch.

Create a new marketing entity. My name was 'Perigee - the closest approach'. Products would be developed based on the foundation-chassis of emerging Thiel products. The CS6 and 3.6 were in development. Products would reach elevated levels of aesthetics and performance. Performance would be via ideas like we are now exploring: better parts, internal or external cooling, bi and/or tri-wire with customer assistance to get it right. The cabinets would incorporate some eased or rounded edges or panels, use of exotic materials, super-selected veneers with sophisticated scraped and French-polished surfaces. Each finished pair would be optimized in the anechoic chamber rather than simply verifying its performance within tolerances as in production Thiels.

A corollary might be super performance professional monitors in service-clad rather than furniture grade cabinets. We had some high-end production and mastering labs using our speakers by that time.

Markets would be upscale. Prices might be double or triple those of stock. Although I call the idea fantasy. Its presentation and discussion were real - but its feasibility was very weak. Thiel was already straining under its relentless 30%/ year growth pressure. Taking on more was  unthinkable. 

Just for grins, I googled 'Perigee Audio' and it seems that an Australian has undertaken a similar idea with another historic line of speakers. However, I suspect such an idea might work for some enterprising young company. Who knows if Coherent Source Service might stretch into such a role . . . Isn't life interesting.