Thiel Owners

BTW this Thursday I’m getting an in-home audition of the Paradigm Persona 9H which another poster in this forum seemed to think gets closer to the "rightness" in terms of timbre and tone that my Thiels give me. Its my first venture outside the Thiel family to try to get to to that "final speaker" for this 61 year old. Of course another audiophile asked me if such a thing actually exists and I can tell you for certain that you WILL have a final speaker of some sort! I’m fortunate enough to be able to at least consider some of the best. I have a short list of other products to hear but I’m going to have to go out of town to hear them. Its sad that today’s high end can only be heard in all its diversity in only our 3 or 4 largest cities. There you can find anything. I’m in a city of 7 million (Atlanta) and the dealers we have are really good but there are only a handful of speaker designers represented. If you want either Vandersteen or Von Schweikert Atlanta has you covered. Others, not so much. While the 9H is expensive you have to remember that even the Vandersteen Quattros are now up to $15K pair.

beetlemania
Thank You for the update from your end. Outstanding detail in the recent post. I am excited to hear the upgrade path that you have explored and integrated into the SE.  Happy Listening!

pwhinson
Thank You for the follow up. I had a feeling that moving the speakers a margin apart could make a positive difference in presentation and sound within your excellent system.  Thumbs up indeed.

Happy Listening!

pwhinson
I concur with your assessment of Atlanta regarding dealers/retailers.
I have watched, for many years, Audio shop after shop closing their doors? The few that are operational do a very good job for us consumers.
You are correct in that only a few speaker brands are represented city-wide. I am looking forward in reading about the in-home demo with Paradigm.

Happy Listening!

Beetle - thank you for consolidating your experience for us. It all sounds quite straight-forward as written, but considerable study and thought went into this trial and, as you know, considerable time elapsed while researching and considering this first trial build. This build is fairly high-end; although more money can always be spent for greater but diminishing returns. The upgrade parts cost alone is somewhere in the $1K range. (We haven't actually counted beans.) I want to commend and thank you for your enthusiasm, patience and careful listening tests with detailed notes and summaries, along with your good-natured willingness to try new solutions when something failed. (For the record, we are experimenting with heat management and mounting the resistors on aluminum heat rails created a subtle sonic anomaly.)

Among the points made above, I wish to comment on one in particular. At the end of the second-last paragraph, you address the "flaws in the recording" issue. This issue has been a constant companion during the entire lifespan of the company. Nearly every reviewer picks it out as a problem, often called out as a shortcoming of the speaker. Indeed there are very many very good speakers which do not exhibit this trait. At the very beginning, when co-developing the 03 as a phase coherent point source vs "normal" topology, we sweated blood over whether to take this plunge, knowing it would remain the core of our struggle forever going forward. We did and it did. Our central reason is philosophical: "the best speaker reproduces its input signal with the greatest fidelity in all its aspects." Phase coherence has been both a burden and a torch that led our way.

This "warts and all" approach is, as you know, not the normal approach, which seeks to present the most involving musical suspension of disbelief with the broadest range of recordings to the largest body of listeners. Everyone at Thiel learned to live with the "bare, naked facts" dilemmas, as did many critics, dealers and users around the world. But we still hear today a drum-beat of criticism around how revealing Thiel speakers are.

My central misgiving in this upgrade project is that it seeks to intensify that "music under a lens" approach. Every day I hear technical, mixing and mastering errors or shortcomings on recordings. In fact, in my life after Thiel Audio I have provided evaluation services to recording artists by identifying such flaws in their production mixes and trial masters (and that is with stock CS2.2s.) So the results and report of your upgrade journey gives me encouragement. I believe and you concur that by removing more of the subtle artifacts introduced by the speaker, we are more closely approaching the original musical event, making a firmer connection between the music and the listener. I believe that connection brings joy, even if it reveals some flaws in the music making process. 

So, thank you for your participation and thank you all for your interest, which has helped me take on this rather complex and challenging project.