Thiel Owners

tonywinga

PM sent.   Happy Listening!

Hi Guys - I'll swing back and answer some loose threads as I find time. Last night I locked the door on my vacated Middle Crossing shop and studio. The building was sold and I closed shop on very short notice, selling 30 tons of wood and some tools and equipment, and storing way too much stuff for further preparation for sale later this summer. Big trip. Looking forward to a simpler life focused around musical instruments and audio. Still a long way to go before the external premises are clear and the excess is sold. Then there's the challenge of finding new space - real estate is extremely thin here in this small, safe, rural New England town where everyone from the city with sufficient means seems to want to relocate. Challenges keep us young, right?

cargen - you speculated about using some Thiel PXOs on other subwoofers. Here are my thoughts. Thiel's passive crossover matches the characteristics of the two speakers (sub and main), providing real,engineered rolloff slopes just like the subs were in the full-range speaker. They work very well for that intended use and in the case of the 5-channel PXO5, all the channels are integrated with the low bass. So using PXOs with different drivers with different characteristics than specified by their design would not work well. The magic is that a real crossover is provided because the characteristics of the woofer and main speaker are known and taken into account.

All - regarding CS2.4 production variants - my data is pretty sketchy. (It helps my puzzle-solving if you guys state your serial numbers if you can.) They ran from 2003 to 2012 when replaced by the 2.7. I have records of only 1000 pair, which interests me greatly. The 2.4 seems to be a bit of a audiophile darling, yet its sales are tied for lowest of any model. The SE may add 100 pair (or be included in the 1000 count.) It seems the progression from Lexington to FST / China is around sn 220 - 230. My personal experience along with other collaborators on this forum suggests that transition may partly account for the low sales volume. Reviewers and early enthusiasts would all have experienced the original Lexington units. The later (post 230) units to my ear lack the finesse, delicacy and ease of the originals. I wonder out loud if that discontinuity amounted to anything in the marketplace. It also seems that offshore sales were accounting for an increasing share of sales and that the USA market may have suffered via other non-product problems. Just guessing.

Rob says that Jim OK'd the FST production. But there are also documented stories of heated disagreements between Jim and Kathy as Marketing Director regarding various issues in that time-frame of the 2.4. Tim Tipton (long-term purchasing manager) ventured that Jim's ear was slipping. Cancer doesn't help bodily system performance.

The bottom line is that there is lots of room for improvement in the CS2.4 and with the considerable work already done on it and its forebearer the CS2.2, I suspect those 2.4 owners may be in for a sonic uplift if they so wish.

This makes me wonder if a cheap crossover is why I never warmed up to my MCS1.  I bought it off Amazon in 2012 or later during the brief time Thiel was on Amazon.  I love my 2 2s and 3.7s but I never found the MCS1 to be on the same level.  I bought it as a center channel for movies and I don't really watch that many movies so that's part of it.  It could just be that I typically ran it off of an HT receiver but I ran my 2 2s off of one and still found them great.  hmmm.