Thiel Owners

I called Rob Gillum about the COAX installation know what needs to be done to resolve the out-of-phase issue. I have decided to use the services of a local audio store in Santa Barbara. They will send a repair tech to my home next Tuesday to do the soldering. Learning a lot of technical stuff with this hiccup.

I decided to move the Thiel CS3.7 to a new position. I now have them 2 feet from the front wall and about 2 feet from the side wall. The speakers are now closer together about 6 feet apart. The sound now is better than any other prior placement. Even with DRC I will keep this positioning, mainly because I have 3 out of 4 sources that will not use DRC. Only my digital streaming via ROON will use DRC (if I like it).

So next week is when the interesting stuff happens. Enjoying the out-of-phase tunes until then.

I also bought an CS3.7 Outrigger for the speaker feet. My 4 year old first words when he saw the CS3.7 in my office was "I want to climb it".

yyzsantabarbara

keep us posted on the Coax fix.

Happy Listening!

yysantabarbara

Nice catch or should I say good ears ,
but strange because the coax speakers polarity are clearly marked
with the red and black wires going from the solder pad to the speaker ,
and  if the crossover is like the 2.7 the negative / black wires from the tweeter and midrange  are soldered together .

I hope that wrong wiring is your problem .
Good luck and hope it's not to big of a repair bill .

Yyz - the definitive test is to make a momentary connection from a 6 volt lantern battery (or other 6 volt DC source) to the XO inputs. All drivers should move forward. You can readily see the woofer and midrange move, but may have to feel the tweeter. And Thiel uses silver solder which has a higher melt temp than utility solder. A 140 watt gun is just right.

Thanks everyone for the great info provided here. It has made this problem pretty easy and fast to resolve. I have a speaker repair tech from the local high end audio store coming to my home next Tuesday. The cost is not much for 1 hour work and the speaker seller has volunteered to cover the expense. The estimated cost is pretty low (so far) so not concerned. I will have everything ready to just unsolder and re-solder.

The speaker tech is aware of the battery test though the sound engineer in Canada told me to send him another set of measurements and he will tell me if it is setup correctly. I will see how experienced the repair guy is before I figure out which way to test it.

I received the following feedback from Rob Gillium today about the wiring.

The CS3.7 is a three way speaker, with a Passive Radiator. Each crossover section has a pair of output wires. There are three pairs. One pair to the woofer, one pair to the midrange (coax), and one pair to the tweeter (coax). The coaxial driver is a two driver combination, (midrange and tweeter). Each driver has a pair of wires. The white output wire is positive and should be connected to the red terminal of each driver. The black wire is connected to each unmarked. terminal of the drivers. These wires must be connected in this fashion, to be in phase with each other. If one of the drivers are connected out of phase (reverse polarity), then it will cancel the output from the other driver, thus rendering poor sonic quality. It is very important to connect the midrange pair to the midrange, and the tweeter pair to the tweeter. If these are connected wrong, then the tweeter will see the mid frequencies, and be destroyed in most cases.

I was also speaking with a CS3.7 owner in Brazil who is active on the ASR forum and he thought the Coda #8 V1 would be what he would select from the #8 options. However, he did mention that Purifi is going to come out with a new module that will have similar specs as the NC1200. He is waiting on that before any new amp purchase. He suggested I do the same.

I have a feeling the current Purifi module sounds very similar o the AHB2. A future module with the the same sound but NC1200 power specs would be great for the CS3.7.

I should say again how happy I am that I payed attention to TomThiel’s post about positioning. I was initially trying to get max space between the speakers with low side and later low front wall spacing. Now with the speakers around 2 feet from the front wall, 2 feet from the side, and only 6 feet in-between, the sound is really good, the best so far.