Thiel Owners

Sandy - I hope that name is OK, since that's your hi-fi identity to me.

I credit Harry Pearson with creating high end out of its hi fidelity foundation. Hi Fi had been generally academic, formal and engineering driven. Hi End was generally young, entrepreneurial and music driven. Thiel straddled the two worlds more than many high end companies. But Harry was the first to take live music with all its nuances and psychic / emotional / intangible hooks as the Absolute Sound, the real and final reference for our work. He and his team created much of the vocabulary which we still use. Many related industries lack such vocabulary or frame of reference and therefore struggle with having to prove their work, satisfy the textbooks, and so forth.

oblgny,

I had a similar situation last year. I’d saved for a couple of years to buy new speakers. Out of nowhere hit with huge financial blow. All that saved money disappeared in an instant, as did a lot more. Been digging out from under it ever since.

I have to say, selling old hi-fi gear isn’t exactly the fastest route to financial recovery ;-)

BTW, I was a fan of Meadowlark back in the day too. I liked the Shearwaters, I had the Heron-i speakers in my home for a while, and owned the little Meadowlark Swallow stand mounted speakers.One of my regrets was selling those little speakers - they have a combination of clarity, warm tone with simply astonishing "disappearing act" imaging. It’s one of those old "still-hurts" sales that makes me hoard my current speakers :)

As I’ve mentioned somewhere earlier in the thread, probably my biggest issue with the Meadowlark design was the weird interference that happened vertically between the drivers, due to the first-order design.A weird image/tonal shift hollowing out a little part of the frequency spectrum. Thiel seemed to have solved that first-order crossover issue in their later designs.

prof,

Do you still have your 2.7s?

George

Thiel seemed to have solved that first-order crossover issue in their later designs.

Probably due to the use of coax drivers.  The high freq./short wavelength xover between the mid and the tweeter is most problematic, but with coax, it's mostly not a problem.  People have commented that the pre-coax Thiel also had problem with mid/tweeter integration with vertical listening axis.

prof 

Agreed - selling off stereo gear isn’t necessarily the path back to financial stability, but since two channel listening is my sole guilty pleasure I had, and have, nothing else of significant value to the general public. 
I woulda been worse off without the funds selling it managed to raise. Ugh. 

Anyway, I’ve been listening to the Belles 250i and I continue to be VERY impressed. A lot of the remarks in this thread include the words “uncolored, musical, airy”, and this little integrated hits all those marks. There is VERY little info on its specs anywhere to be found while at the same time a plethora of information about David Belles.  Interesting man. 

I’ve said before that I love both Thiel and Maggies. Jumping back and forth between the brands as I have sacrifices one thing or another, but IMHO, the trade offs are minimal at best. “Thiels are Maggies - but with mo’ bass”, I’ve said before.  

I don’t intend to hijack the thread, but if anyone is considering a Belles product, based on my thus far limited experience with one of them, I say go for it. 
Ani Difranco’s “Evolve” album, and Paul Simon’s “So Beautful So What” have some fairly complex interplay going on in many tracks, and with the Belles I can literally feel the pluck of guitar strings. The bass - MMGi’s don’t reach down very far, 50hz - also can be “felt.”  

I can can only imagine how a Thiel will sound in lieu of the Maggies.  It’s gonna happen.  Don’t know when, but it will.  

Alrighty - back to the thread!