Thiel Owners

tomthiel

It is a great aural exercise to test loudspeakers with different passages and tones of music for evaluation. Jazz is excellent in this aspect.

Happy Listening!

Prof - for my explorations of imagination I use the 02 as a path not taken. An entire business could have been built on developing and enriching that simple two way box. My unambiguous progress is in the realm of the acousto-mechanical: grille and baffle treatment, port mechanics, cabinet bracing, etc. Enter electro-magnetics and tings get much murkier for me. In the XO, my straightforward progress has been separating the XO halves and moving away from the driver. The drivers themselves represent middle ground. Substituting a modern Thiel (CS.5) woofer removes the normal distortions of normal drivers. Similarly, higher grade caps and resistors certainly solve more than they confuse.
But the realm of wire is truly deep stuff. I have ruled out silver entire or plated. Entirely silver is unaffordable; plating introduces problems, both audible and measurable. I suspect you would enjoy finding someone who really knows wire. The guy in charge of Belden's normal wire has created a high-end entry. It looks a lot like the Kimber stuff that blew our minds in the early 80s. (At $1,000 / pair foot in the day) it broke down our mental barriers to how wire can matter. I don't know enough.

Wire experiments are cumbersome, tedious and expensive. I have migrated to using the 02 with a CS.5 woofer (very linear full range) with no crossover and 4 sets of inputs connected to 4 lengths x 1 foot long, all wired to the driver. Each input pair is fed by equal lengths of Straightwire star quad Octave II. One cable twisted pair per input pair. A second speaker stretches my test samples to 8 pairs. A second speaker stretches my test samples to 8 pairs. I compare the 4 variants in one speaker and then run a FuzzMeasure sweep, which shows distinct (albeit small) differences. No test is perfect, but this one is fairly streamlined.

Wire differences, both audible and measured, are definite and have become instructive. But, far from definitive yet. More study required as the academics say.

By the way, guys, I'm looking for a few pairs of 02s to hotrod.

Prof - I would love your feedback regarding their sound, when the time comes. I'll say that the more that I improve the technical performance and address the shortcomings caused by our naivete in 1976, the less they sound like Thiel 02s, and the more they sound like more recent Thiels. And it's not simply that better is better.

Tweak - your Starsound wire comment is fascinating. As I seek to reduce jacketing contribution, you are using it as an electromagnetic design element. Are you guys associated with MIT?

JAFant - jazz is great all around for its layers of nuance. And there's a lot of well-made jazz out there. I landed on my wide rather than deep approach to sources partly as a contrast to the usual way. Thiel, and most others I knew at the time, used favorite tracks, known to be well made, thereby minimizing the variable of aural input "noise". I call that deep as in drilling farther and further into the subtleties of that track. But, what if those pristine tracks didn't stimulate the "sizzle / tinsel ", etc. Whatever the cause, a problem could be dismissed as a "bad recording". But what if (as I now suspect) some of those "bad recordings" might just be exacerbating shortcomings in the speaker. This territory is where most of my detective work is happening.