Thiel Owners

Although I and Kathy were integrally part of the early decisions, directions and perspectives, it was Jim who took the bit in his teeth to create the electro-acoustic solutions. And he got better and better. My chief contribution was building a company and creating a manufacturing platform and capacity to support and manufacture Jim's designs. A manufacturing company defines itself by what it can actually accomplish as well as the designs it sets out to make. Our plant could make things with high precision and repeatability at low cost, which allowed fairly sophisticated designs to be translated into real world products at affordable prices. Additionally, I developed a very capable "project shop" for in-house prototyping, including hydro-spinning cones, machining motor assemblies, making production tooling and producing finished products, troubleshot and production-ready. In my travels, I've never seen anything like it, especially at such a small scale. Thiel remained under $10million / year with 50 or fewer employees. That's tiny for our high level of vertical integration.

8th-note - gotta go soon, so you get the short answer. Do some practicing with a vacuum cleaner and then pull your dent out with vacuum. If you don't hear voice coil rubbing, you're not doing damage. When it's as smooth as you can get it, put the grilles on. The speaker was meant to have them, plus you won't see the dust-cap.

8th-note
Welcome! back. Good to see you here. I concur, Georgia to Washington State is quite a trek. It is all about the Audio journey.  What other gear including cabling is in your system? I look forward in reading more about your musical tastes.
Happy Listening!

The inability of certain personalities to cope with ambiguity makes the people watching aspect of audio a lot of fun. You can see with the audioholics guys that they are very emotionally invested in there being nothing audible that can't be measured. I think it would be a significant blow to their self-image if it turned out they were wrong. I get that they're annoyed by BS marketing and absurd prices but that's definitely not the whole story. Maybe it's fear that somebody might know or understand more than them in some area? 

Regardless, with active DSP speakers comes the possibility that slopes can be variable. I wish I could run my Thiels first order for acoustic music that doesn't have excessive bass and I don't listen to very loudly. On the other hand, when I want to rock it'd be great if I could just switch them to 4th order for increased headroom. I wonder if the new Meadlowlark has that ability. I saw that they're using mini DSP in their products.

jafant,

In response to your question about my StraightWire cables, I was using Encore speaker cables and Rhapsody II (RCA) interconnects in my system until just a few months ago. After switching to a PS Audio Stellar stack in early 2019, I decided to try several moderate-priced balanced interconnects in my system. Using XLR's from the Cable Company lending library, I decided that the Cardas Parsec XLR sounded better in my system than the Rhapsody II RCA I already owned (2nd place), Shunyata Venom XLR (third place), or Synergistic Research XLR (fourth place). I'm now using the Cardas XLR between my Gain Cell DAC/Pre and my M700 monoblocks. 

When I replaced the interconnect, I did not replace my StraightWire Encore speaker cable. Based on my room configuration, I have speaker cables that are 24 feet long and run under my living room floor. This arrangement makes replacement of the speaker wires quite expensive for reasonably good wire, so I'm keeping my StraightWire cables for now. Fortunately, the folks at StraightWire tell me that the Encore cable remains a very solid choice for my Thiel 2.2s and that even spending quite a bit more money would only get me small improvements in sound quality for my investment.