Thiel Owners

@jafant & @jazzman7

You guys definitely bring back some memories! Back in high school, when car stereo was HUGE, I remember the local installer/enthusiast community absolutely loved Cerwin Vegas. They were more then once described as the “home version of a 2000 watt bass box”!  LOL...the things we loved from our youth, right?

Arvin C

The antithesis of the 'classic' Thiel sound, often stereotyped, never copied? I'm pulling these purely out of memory from dozens of audio shows and general familiarity, not A/B home listening!  I could be wrong on any of these, corrections are welcome.

Sonus Faber, rich, romantic, not particularly 'fast.'

Harbeth, Spendor, or several British speakers (among others I'm sure) that still have the 'BBC dip' as part of their sonic design intent (a dip in the upper midrange to make them sound less-forward, more-'polite').

Magnepan or Apogees, the opposite of box speakers, with dipole radiation, narrow lateral dispersion, broad wide imaging (the antithesis of 'pinpoint'), limited bass dynamics and extension, certainly not bright. (I'm leaving out true electrostatics as so often reviewers compare Thiel's speed and coherence to them).

Horn loaded speakers starting with Klipsch, including some of the Cerwin Vegas mentioned. Huge SPLs with no danger of frying a midrange coax.

Not that any of these brands are innately 'inferior' or 'worse' than Thiels, but that their design briefs -- by choice or speaker type -- are quite different.

sdecker

I friend owned the Apogee Slant 8 model back in the early 90's. I really enjoyed that loudspeaker's sound.  It would be a fun side-by-side shoot out w/ a pair of Thiel CS 2.4 loudspeakers.

Happy Listening!

sdecker

I will second, Klipsch. Like so many great loudspeaker designers, Paul, had a vision and built some absolute classic models.

Happy Listening!

The Apogee Stage is a formidable speaker - very musical 2 way. I have 2.3 also, and ESL63, the list goes on.... well it definitely stops well before Cerwin Vega often with the plastic $4 bullet tweeter...