Thiel Owners

Honor to you George.

I forgot to mention one big surprise (to me) from Munich show.....the incredible loudspeakers Maat Vector from Sigma Acoustics, a small italian craft company and extremely expensive one but wow!.... what sound! 100db of sensibility and absolute quality. 

tomthiel

Fascinating, thanks again.

I’ve been listening to my little Spendor S 3/5 monitors in my system, for the past couple of weeks. Like the Thiel 02s these have, for me, some "magic tone" that makes me want to just keep listening.

I was listening to an LP I picked up, Genesis’ Abacab, and enjoying what these little speakers did with this record. But then I switched the speaker wires back to my Thiel 2.7s and cranked it. What a crazy difference. Especially from listening down the hall outside the room, the scale and punch to the sound was phenomenal. Phil Collins sounded almost like he’d invade a room in our house!

And the linearity and control of the big Thiels is something else. They sound linear and "boxless" not only in the listening room’s sweet spot, but even from just outside the room, in the hallway, or down the hallway.There’s no speakerly "bloat" that shows up, so it just sounds like instruments playing in that room, not boxes creating sound.
(I was inspired to hook up the 2.7s again after a listening session at my friend's house who has a big pair of over 20K speakers in for review...something of a new darling in the audiophile world it seems....and while they were excellent, I found my system much more convincing overall).

Prof:  my girlfriend says the same thing with my 3.7's (and with the 2.7's I used to have).   she says that from another room like the kitchen for example,  she thinks it sounds like a real band in the listening room when playing rock and pop.  classical not as much but then it is hard to imagine an orchestra in the house. 

amazing

Prof - I'm out of touch with today's market, but there do seem to be plenty of very expensive speakers out there with knowledgeable folks wishing for better performance.

About the next room phenomenon - that addresses an open question in my mind. I don't know if the industry agrees about radiation patterns. I do know that we at Thiel decided in a technical vacuum that our speakers would act as a quasi point sources with the 30° off-axis radiation being as close as possible in power response to the on-axis response. Definsible guess.

I now understand from sound reinforcement that directionality is part of their formula, based on very sophisticated Green's Functions governing wave propagation through distance. I don't know what pattern is considered ideal or if home playback should follow the same rules. But I do know that from the beginning Thiel took some hits because our speakers had "too much" high frequency energy in the room. J. Gordon Holt, founder of Stereophile, is known to have commented when hearing Thiel 03s from the next room "it sounds great from here, but music doesn't sound like what we're hearing in there".

I do know that recording engineers differ widely regarding the playback conditions assumed in their mixing and mastering.

Unsound - on a related note, I just read the 2003 thread with your active participation that included lots of very lucid input from Roy Johnson of Green Mountain Audio. He alludes to adherence to the Green's Functions in his speakers, along with other very advanced assertions. Smart Guy. Their website seems to have truncated at 2011. Do you know how the Green Mountain products fared in the marketplace? Or what critical acclaim they got, or agreement that their limited dispersion formula was "right"? I would appreciate whatever you can share.