Thiel Owners

I've recently felt some despair concerning the amount of snake oil in our hobby and the industry, (when audiophiles wonder why we are a source of bemusement and mockery, we need look no further than the farcical high end cable racket). 


I found revisiting some old interviews with Jim Thiel, print and video, uplifting in that regard.  It is just so nice to see a real engineer speaking with humility,  in sensible terms about real world phenomena, non-magical engineering goals, and making sense of the clever engineering steps he took to solve them.  It's also confidence-inspiring thatsuccess of some of Jim's central goals were verifiable by independent measurements - e.g. those stereophile measurements showing the time/phase coherence had been achieved. 


Aside from the wonderful sonic qualities of the Thiel speakers, it's rewarding to own a piece audio gear that is the result of, and emblematic of, both great engineering and the integrity of the designer and his company.

Jim sure was one of the good guys.  (Same goes for Tom, and other Thiel employees).

prof, 

Agree!

George

How were the improvements measured? Jim Thiel again: "The improved resolution is not the kind of thing that shows up well in measurements; the magnitude of the difference between the CS2.4 and the CS2.4SE is more easily heard than discerned from graphs. The new capacitors allow more nuance, air, detail, and decay to be reproduced by the coaxial drive unit. This was especially evident to us when listening to recordings that contained realistic reverberation, as well as recordings where the instruments were not processed heavily."

https://www.soundstageultra.com/equipment/thiel_cs24se.htm

"SOME of Jim's CENTRAL GOALS were verifiable by independent measurements ..."
;-)

prof
I’ve recently felt some despair concerning the amount of snake oil in our hobby and the industry, (when audiophiles wonder why we are a source of bemusement and mockery, we need look no further than the farcical high end cable racket).

>>>>>>Try not to despair too much. Look on the bright side - much has been learned about cable design from high end cable companies. One cannot ignore the “sound engineering” involved in many newer innovations implemented by Audioquest and others - e.g., highly polished solid core wire surfaces, control of directionality for not only speaker cables and interconnects but also power cords and HDMI cables, cryogenics, silver content in connectors, and others. I hate to judge too harshly but it appears there is quite a bit of misunderstanding regarding the nature of the audio signal in cables, you know, judging from the recent threads on the subject.