Thiel Owners

tomthiel,

A life time lover of Thiel Audio, I never managed to own any myself - either due to $, space, or SAF restrictions. Although I had never heard them, the Powerpoints always intrigued me, so when I recently stumbled onto a set of 5 Powerpoint 1.2’s, I grabbed them. I was blown away in a rudimentary 2.1 audition on the floor (hardwood over concrete). In fact, the imaging was so convincing that my SO wandered into the room and asked what I’d done to the floorstanders next to them. “Her voice sounds so natural”. She then noticed the Powerpoints and asked, “And what are those things on the floor?! They look like boobs!” Which, in fact they do. No wonder I’d always been intrigued! In fact, I was so impressed that I’ve been accumulating Powerplanes as well - perhaps to supplement the PPoints in a future multichannel project. I’m even a bit sorry to have missed those recent Viewpoints for the bedroom TV.

I was powering the PP1.2’s with a Bluesound Powernode 2i which is what I had on hand. Although the little (60W) hybrid digital amp is quite respectable in it’s own right, I have to wonder if I couldn’t do better. I have tried to follow your PP1.2 saga, but the thread is HUGE and the search function may not have turned up all your posts. I’ve never found what you are using to drive yours. Any recommendations - preferably used/depreciated? And do you cross them to a sub? I’ve accumulated both the 2 and 5 channel dedicated Thiel passive sub crossovers as well. ;-)

The trail seems to have grown cold on the external crossover mods - seemingly related to the bankruptcy settlement. Any updates there?

Thx in advance. And in retrospect as well.

Tom Thiel when you stated Long Engineering was that the company of Ed Long who patented the Time Align setup for crossovers? In the early 80’s a friend and I contracted Ed Long to design a 8 in midbass driver and a 4 inch midrange driver that were built by Eminence which is about 30 miles from my home.

The 8 inch was in a rather small sealed enclosure and the mid and tweeter were mounted on sculpted panel time offset to the wooden cabinet attached below. The midrange was mounted in a open back damped tube. Both the 8 in and 4 inch were very shallow in cone depth. Ed’s thinking was the deeper the cone the more time the cone was out of time alignment as it traveled. Of course Ed designed the crossover as well.

The bass eventually became a early version of the ELF subwoofers who along with Long was patented by Ron Wickersham . Eminence built us 10 inch woofers which we mounted 2 in a each separate but attached cabinet. These also had a time offset. The drivers were crossed over below the system resonance point and we put in use a Mcintosh MQ 104 xover and eq for the woofers extension and control. They were powered by a Tom Holman amp. Incredible soundstage and super fast powerful bass with no boom or overhang. May be the the best integrated bass I have ever heard to this day. Good luck to all following this thread and sharing their experiences and upgrades. Tom

Snbeall - the upgrade project is making progress every day, but the reports are lean due to legal / ownership uncertainties, which I never expected to take this long to work out. All products can be improved with better passive components, but the newer the products, the less bang for buck. Stay tuned. Use the PPs as-is.

The PP1.2 was my first approach to modern Thiels, after using my 2.2s for decades as mix-master evaluation tools. The PP1.2 blows me away, just as they are, and even more so with component upgrades. I haven't yet tried my emerging "Laminar Launch" technology on it, but its already-small and round form factor may be the best of the Thiel batch in its stock form. Stay tuned.

Regarding subwoofer - the PP benefits the most of all, since its bass was never intended as a stand-alone, and its roll out is critically damped 2nd order and optimized for subwoofer mating. My best results are by hanging the PPs on the ceiling (as recommended in the User Guide), and placing a subwoofer against the front wall, below each PP. The room-tuning sets on Thiel SmartSubs provide compensation for the wall or corner reinforcement.

A big deal is that the PP makes no floor or ceiling bounce as there always is with floor-standers. The ear-brain compensates wonderfully for those bounce interferences, but when they are absent, the sound becomes more natural. As you see, I'm a fan.

Tom - indeed Ed and his brother Bill were our source for the model 01 tweeter. They knew their stuff. We had hoped to work with Ed Long, and with Eminence as we developed our own drivers. But Ed wanted full design control (including XOs, etc.) which was a non-starter for us, and Eminence ran out of their depth early-on. At the time they could not source cast baskets, and were not interested in Jim's custom pole geometries and close tolerances and QC specs. Their attitude was that if it's good enough for Peavey, it should be good enough for you. Peavey was their principal customer and pretty demanding for the times, but home playback was a different league that they couldn't relate to. We found Vifa at their beginning and developed a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with them, until they ran out of depth and we took matters in-house in the mid 1990s.