Thiel Owners

   From Tom Thiel:  "The odd jujitsu is that the human auditory brain is so good at assembling-synthesizing known tonal sounds from the transient impulse data stream . . . that in an intellectual way, we enjoy the decoding process which we call hearing.
For myself, and the small minority of those who 'get it', there is a direct path to the core being when that sonic analysis-reassembly is not necessary, when the unadulterated musical signal arrives as natural sound. As Andy says, and as the physics supports, and psychoacoustics agrees, there is only one way to accomplish that direct stream in a multiple driver system: first order crossover slopes."
I wonder (just a guess)  if this is in some ways similar to  jitter with regard to  digital.  Digital was fatiguing for so long and now there is a lot of thinking that jitter was the problem and companies like PS and others have addressed that issue and thus digital is less fatiguing.  Perhaps Thiel with their first order crossovers make our brains work less hard at assembling what we hear?

Kent - Yes, precisely.

Jitter is timing errors which were believed by many to exist beyond human hearing, because when translated into the frequency / tonal domain, the artifacts are beyond the audible range. The auditory brain must work hard to weed out the temporal artifacts of jitter, causing fatigue or other distancing mechanisms. Dither spreads them toward randomness and therefore more easily ignored.

In higher order slopes, the onset transient arrives in distinctly parsed segments, one for each driver. The ABrain does indeed combine them, using memory, later-arrived reflections and decay parameters to make sense of them - all occurring later in time after brain work. Live music comes all intact. Well recorded and made music played back through single speaker / headphones can preserve that all-intactness. Multi driver / higher order slope speakers cannot preserve it; although they minimize the deleterious effects by creating timing with few or no sharp discontinuities, saying the ear can't tell the difference between single or multiple arrival times. In a manner of thinking, they are of course correct - the ABrain is very skilled - unless you are a listener who appreciates the coherent rightness of unified arrival transients such as heard in real (non-reproduced) music and sound.

That particular component of "realness" appreciation is shared among many Thiel owners.

thank you Tom. all though i cannot honestly claim that i understand all you said, i get the main points for sure. When i listen to a well recorded symphony, such as on Reference Recordings, i really get a sense of a complete orchestra and it sounds real and alive  and very coherent, though obviously not at the same scale as the real thing.

Reference Recordings are completely phase correct, as is your playback chain unless there is a wiring error. So the signal at your speakers is phase coherent and if the speakers keep it straight you can hear that proverbial pin drop. Enjoy.

Tom,
Your message to @ronkent mentions the phase coherence of the playback chain. How does one tell if the playback chain is phase coherent?
Todd