Thiel Owners

@tomthiel and @jafant  and @jon_5912 :

Thanks all!  I emailed and made what I hope is a reasonable offer - $450 (they're listed for $600).  

Will post back if able to complete purchase.

Tom,

Could the splatt heard be caused from turbulence inside the cabinet generated from crossover placement or the mounted components. The air flow would be disrupted by the mounting arrangement of the components on the board. The turbulence would change with an increase in excursion. Internally I have much sonic success with hard coupling the board to the speaker bottom and able to tune the board externally with a brass hex head assembly..1/8 of a turn can make some good magic.  When the board is mounted outside there wouldnt be the turbulence but there is always a benefit in mechanically grounding the board to the higher mass of the floor. Resonant energy will go that way if given the right material and geometry. Tom

Tom - your hypothesis is of interest. One observation is that all Thiel speakers mount their XOs to the bottom or back near the bottom with lots of fiberglass between the XO and the drivers / moving air. Plus the sound is hard, like a driver bottoming. When I put the redeveloped XO inside the cabinet, mounted on nylon studs and rubber feet, the problem had vanished. My best guess is some sort of electromagnetic saturation and/or possibly the bottom end of the midrange bottoming out. (But I didn't change the midrange driver, only some specifics of the crossovers.)
As I've mentioned before, getting the XO out of the cabinet does worlds of good. My in-cabinet solution is different from yours - I am suspending each of the 3 small crossover boards in free air, rather than clamping it the the wall where it must absorb the cabinet wall vibration.

With my in cabinet solution the resonance that will always accumulate on a chassis or components suspended or not will be dissipated with specific coupling methods and geometric shapes. For my method to work most effectively the same mechanical grounding scheme must be applied to the outside bottom of the cabinet to the higher mass of the floor. Suspended devices in free air especially under the bombardment inside a cabinet are presented with no path to dissipate resonance so those components will pass that interference on to the rest of the circuit.

Your method does reduce the material cabinet resonance from compounding the air impact resonance of your suspended parts. The free air method still holds onto some of the resonance which then becomes part of the system. Tom

Input accepted. What I know for now is that this rubber-damped / no cabinet contact method performs considerably better than stock Thiel. And that putting a crossover inside a cabinet is an inherently compromised idea. Further improvements always await.