Thiel Owners

@tomic601 
Did Stereophile review the Kento already? I didn’t renew my subscription last year. Not happy with JA’s promotion, even hype, of MQA. Jim Austin taking the reins was a deal breaker for me. 
Meanwhile, JA’s protocols really put Thiels and Vandersteens at a disadvantage. Comparing Stereophile’s and Soundstage’s measurements of the CS2.4, for example, it’s almost like they were not measuring the same speaker (Soundstage contracts with NRC which has a real anechoic chamber and they can measure at 2 m). The 2.4 has what appears to be the flattest frequency response in the Soundstage database!

What is really, really unfair is designing an amp for just the high pass and knowing the load like the back of your hand - and at two price points. 
I will post something  quasi politically correct about JA tomorrow... I suppose it’s a tightrope 

But... I did hear the Kento in a large room with the M5 amps and a Mac Tube front end..... and let me just say I have NEVER heard Mac gear image like that EVER....

Harrow & The Harvest - Tennessee, should make ya weep

Beetle - JA's testing procedure was dictated by physical / budget constraints. Fair enough. In the early years he explained how / in what ways his measurements were misconstruing the truth. But as time went on, he spoke as though the anomalies from his procedural limitations were real, such as not mentioning that anomaly A, B, Etc. would vanish at a 2.5 or 3 meter listening distance. He also gravitated toward language showing how his measurements confirmed or related to the reviewer's listening notes, rather than the actual parameters of the product under test. This editorial drift smacks of publisher's demands for internal self-legitimization. JA certainly has the knowledge and experience to understand the territory, and the linguistic skills to explain it well. Whereas founder Gordon Holt and second publisher Larry Archibald were true music and gear lovers, it doesn't seem like the subsequent publishers had service of music as their driving principle.

Yes, in the 1990s there were a couple of Thiel reviews wherein JA acknowledged the "suckout" was probably more a result of his techniques than actual performance. From the CS2.3 measurements section:

The 50" mike distance I use is a compromise between the need for correct drive-unit integration and the opposed need for midrange resolution in the resulting graph. But it is possible that the lack of presence-region energy in fig.3 is actually due to the 50" mike distance and is not real, in that it disappears at the farther distances at which a speaker like the Thiel will be listened to.

There was at least one other Thiel review wherein he said something similar. But I think he didn't write a word about this in any Thiel review after ca. 2000. I am thankful for how JA built Stereophile up, particularly, becoming the only US audio mag with subjective reviews *and* measurements (even if the measurements have obvious faults, at least they're applied equally to all products). But present day Stereophile is not for me.