Thiel Owners

jafant,

Yes, some of the Synergistic Research products seem too good - or too weird - to be true. I'd have to be working with a friendly dealer to even try them. The latest SR product I tried was a USB cable that was among a group of 5 USB cables from the lending library at the Cable Company. The Synergistic cable had screw-in modules to tune the cable to be warmer or cooler in overall sound. I liked the imaging of the cable, but it seemed to emphasize "air" at the higher frequencies at the expense of the bass, The group of cables I tried included "mid-priced" cables from Cardas, Audience, Synergistic, Stealth, and Shunyata. I ended up buying the Shunyata Alpha, which is pretty high-priced in my world, but far lower priced than the Shunyata Sigma or Omega models.

tomthiel,

I'm only 70, so you have two extra years of knowledge acquisition compared to me. Hope you keep letting interesting ideas seep in. 

Thanks for the thoughts about my 8m cable runs. I've been worried about the long speaker cables, but I can't easily rearrange my multi-purpose living room to move the amps close to the speakers. Most people now seem to recommend going with short speaker cables and long interconnects rather than the other way around, just as you suggested. I spoke to a tech at Cardas about my long speaker runs, and he said that the Parsec cables should work very well at lengths up to at least 30 feet. I hope he's right about this. The Parsec is the latest evolution of the classic Quadlink, which may have been a cable you've come across in one of your previous audio endeavors.

sdl4

Excellent! Good to read that Shunyata is a sonic match. 

Happy Listening!

Spring Solstice

Jon_5912,

About wire/cable effects, I’m with you - a bit skeptical (and feeling bad about it). That said, I have to think that if there are effects, many would come from length, not to mention physical connections/interfaces (as tomthiel has found), so that eliminating or reducing them would be a good goal.

The end result of what you describe as you shorten the connection chain is the active speaker. And the end result of your other notion of taking it a step further and keeping the signal in the digital domain as far as possible are Meridian’s DSP speakers. It’s why I’ve owned a pair for two decades. My Thiels are a more recent enjoyment.



tomthiel,

I can’t help but think that going active was discussed/explored @ Thiel Audio. Could you comment? I can’t imagine what could have been produced were Meridian to use Thiel drivers....

It ruins all the mix and match tinkering that many audiophiles love, but I think you would get a lot more of the younger generation (not to mention spouses) interested in audiophile sound. And honestly get better sound in the end. KEF and Devialet are interesting current examples.

In my perfect world, there would be standardized module sizes similar in principle to rack mount 1U, 2U, etc. that manufacturers could produce and swap out to update as advances come.