Prof - "well" is such an interesting and loaded term. For years I have been pondering what makes some systems sound so "right" and others, perhaps technically more advanced, sound less right. One idea that keeps popping up is at the core of what we are doing in recorded music.
In real, live, acoustic music, there are many distortion mechanisms in play: all the reflections of the site, the compliance of air, the bouncing of and off of the floor and/or ceiling, the audience . . . and so forth and so on. Live hearing is extremely multi-dimensional.
In recorded music, we generally capture each sound source very close-in and pure with little to none of that other stuff going on. Even in distant-mic'd orchestral recording, we go for high-up and clean capture.
Much of mixing and mastering is to introduce distortions to make the sound "better". But it is at best doctored and at worst pretty artificial on the disc. Yes, we play this doctored sound into our headphones or rooms and hope for it to sound "natural".
Many design(er)s of playback equipment accept adding compensations as part of their job. The BBC approach nods to that "sweeten it up" on playback idea. I believe that the ear-brain actually likes distortions, as long as they are harmonic, such as might plausibly have been in the original musical event. The 02 has something like 15% harmonic distortion in the port and a couple of 5%+ areas in the upper bass. Add some diffraction around the drivers and at the cabinet edges and the different panel resonances to the squirmy driver diaphragms . . . and there's a pretty rich soup. And it sounds quite comfortable, kinda friendly, maybe seductive.
At the beginning of Thiel Audio, we actively struggled with this dilemma: do we make a transducer that sounds inviting, or do we make one that replicates its input signal as faithfully as possible. As you know, we chose the latter, which is far more difficult to pull off plus the risks are large. Especially in the early days of digital, but even today, there are far more poorly made recordings than well made ones. And prior to that, there is no real agreement that I can find concerning where the responsibilities lie for what goes on the disc. At Thiel, the winning strategy was that the speaker should accurately translate its input signal into moving air. (Period.) Everything upstream is someone else's responsibility as is the downstream room. There are dozens or scores of aspects and technologies to manage in the chain; for the speaker to try to referee that whole kettle of fish is untenable, actually impossible. And therefore the purer philosophical stance is to make a clean speaker, which we attempted.
My observation is that the recording process often doesn't produce a signal that sounds good when played back neutrally - it requires or assumes various distortions being re-added through playback. The Thiel 02 is by far the highest distortion speaker Thiel ever produced. And it had in its day a very loyal following. I like it surprisingly more than I think I should. My experiments here with bracing the cabinet, upgrading caps and softening edges all serve to clean up the sound and make it sound more "Thielesque", but at the risk of losing some charm. This is like deja vu all over again. The end of the 02 form is the SCS4. I am shopping for a pair of those to help sort out what the Renaissance 02 should be.
