Thiel Owners

I'm off to a dinner meeting. I agree that the terms are used pretty loosely.BTW: Thiel considered in-room power response to be the number one parameter.

T

Tom,  you wrote:

snip >  A lot of the confusion revolves around magazines/reviewers not being able to measure in those real-world situations.

snip >  I don't buy the charts. Note they are taken at 50" and on the tweeter axis, both of which meet Stereophile's MO, but are illegitimate for the system under test. At 100" and 35" ear height, those measurements actually yield clean triangles without those false anomalies.    

Amen!

Soundstage (NRC lab) measures speakers at 2 m - 79”. Their CS2.4 frequency response looks *much* better than that measured by Stereophile. In fact, the 2.4 has the flattest measured response of any in their database (actually, there is a Magico model that was similarly flat). There was at least one test by JA of a Thiel (or was it a Vandy?) wherein he acknowledged the problems around measuring the speaker at only 50”. But he ignored that issue thereafter. 

"in-room power response" - I don't know what that means and if I ever find the time to look into it it'll probably be decades from now.  I will say that maybe the biggest reason I became a Thiel guy is that the 20 year old 2 2's I got for a second system sounded so great in a far from great room.  A lot of reflections will certainly lower resolution but they don't need to make the music unlistenable because it's way to bright, way to bass-heavy and dull, etc.  The overall character of the sound can remain intact if the speaker allows it to.  

I have to eventually ask Tom if all Thiel products are optimized for far field?  That is if I measure the frequency response at far field then repeat at near field, should it deviate a lot?  At far field, room interactions may hide things that near field will reveal.

I have seen some step responses measured by Stereophile for some of the Vandersteen speakers and John Atkinson has to move the microphone up and down to get it right otherwise the treble response will peak too much (probably due to deviation in phases).  But I think it's like cheating.  The listener probably will probably not know which way to move to get the best step response.  Also it seems like Vandersteens may sacrifice the freq. response too much in order to achieve time phase coherent.  For example, the tweeter crosses over the mid at 1KHz which think is pretty low for a tweeter and I wouldn't personally do that just to get time phase coherent.  At least I don't think Thiel speakers do that. 

I think when you measure at far field such as 8ft, the drivers will in general integrate better because the phase a better aligned at far field vs at near field.  For example, if you place a microphone at 1meter at the midrange height, the acoustic distance from the mid to the tweeter will be, let say 4in.  Now if you move the microphone at 8ft distant, the relative acoustic difference will be less than 4in.  It's like looking at things from far distant and your movement will probably not change the field of vision very much vs. if you're really close.