Thiel Owners

Erik - what is your target frequency response, either outdoors / anechoic, or in a room?

Thanks for asking, @tomthiel , honestly I’m a little chagrined sharing what I do with some one who actually has been so successful in the industry.

I should explain that the last time I heard a Thiel speaker was before I returned to my electronics background. Mid 1990s perhaps? I wasn’t really measuring anything then, so I have no way of knowing what I was hearing or what struck me then.

Long after I decided to take some of what I stole from Dr. Leach at Georgia Tech together with modern inexpensive tools and get into speaker design, so I don’t want to say anything as being definitive of how I would hear things now, or what I might be able to ascribe to what I heard in the 90s.

But to answer your question, my target ends up being the old B&K curve at 1 M, but, measured in-room.  Of course, these are cheats I can only get away with for a 2-way speaker. However I recently took in-room at listening location measurements and posted here:

https://speakermakersjourney.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-snr-1-room-response-and-roon.html

The mic was at couch seat level, so probably much closer to mid-woofer axis.

now to Eric’s credit, while his opinion of Thiel high frequency performance is dated

Extremely dated, I wish people would remember that caveat when they post about my comments.

he does have IMO an acute and appropriate focus on room treatments:-)

Ty for the kind words, @tomic601 , but for me it is necessity. I am unusually susceptible to room acoustics, and wish I was not. I run into so many audiophiles at shows who can shrug it off. Wish I was more like that.

tomic601

try - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E69dKx8uAXY

Happy Listening!

As above, those Vandersteen carbon drivers are incredible.
If Jim were alive today, I suspect, he would have beaten Richard to this incredible, modern, loudspeaker technology.

Happy Listening!

Indeed carbon rocks. And I salute Richard Vandersteen all around, and his implementation of carbon on a balsa core in particular. Jim used aluminum on a styrene core - a poor man's implementation of the same concept. And going back to the 2.2 woofer in 1990, Jim mated a shallow curved front cone with a deeper straight rear cone, trapping a sealed air-space between them to approach the same idea. The air is the damping agent and the two cones' resonant behavior is different from each other. The result is quite remarkable.

I would like to hear Richard's latest model 2 iteration. I bet it's not too different from a Thiel 2.2. I could be wrong, but it seems that as time went by, the two brands converged somewhat. It seems that Vandersteen sold as many model 2s as Thiel sold all models combined. He is one for the history books.

Tom - building his own composite airplane led Richard to Balsa and it’s the lightweight stuff with sattelite grade carbon fiber - the tough stuff is end grain bonding in a lightweight resin fiber layup. For background I don’t know the secret and I ran arguably the most advanced composite shop on the planet B-2, F-22 wing, 787 fuselage, development wing... low tech stuff... ha We all have our hard won secrets.,,
creating drivers w breakup far outside the pass Band is one of the holy grail pursuit imo, especially for those who care about time and phase. jim, Richard, Dunlavey- they all got it ! So glad you carry the torch Tom