Thiel Owners

Anyone heard of a fostex driver thats similar?

Woody - the problem is that first order rolloffs engage the driver for 7+ octaves and Jim's designs control any anomalies via circuitry within that broad range. So, you can find many similar drivers, but re-engineered crossover circuits are required to replicate the original close-tolerance performance.

If I might add to @tomthiels ‘ comments; though both the 3.5’s and 2 2’s had power amp recommendations of between 50 and 250 Watts ( using standard 8 Ohm power ratings, rather than actual specific load recommendations ), as well as the lower lower crossover point of the 3.5’s,  the 3.5’s eq was boosting the bass response by up to 12 dB. Though the boost was targeted for the woofers, as Tom points out the shallow 6 dB 1st order crossover would extend the boost beyond the targeted woofers.

As a quirk of history, the lower midrange boost referenced by unsound caused a bit of weirdness that lasted the life of the company. In order for the woofer/midrange to retain their coherence both drivers had to be fed the same equalized/boosted signal. In other words the EQ couldn't simply boost the woofer because then the crossover slopes would be incorrect and not add properly. (Point of subtlety: the lower ranges of the tweeter also got boosted - it was still contributing below 200 Hz.) Note that the CS3 was bi-wireable with the woofer and midrange on one set of terminals and the tweeter on the other. The ramifications were quite complex depending on what different wire and/or amps, EQ or no EQ, etc.  Jim didn't like cans of worms and decided that the dealer / customer / marketplace had too many opportunities to screw up his design intent, which led to banning double inputs on future products.

The decision was people / marketplace driven rather than performance driven, even though I often hear that Jim was against bi-wiring for performance reasons. (But only if the customer screwed it up.) Our development prototypes were often bi-wired to remove the intermodulation and other cable distortions from the speaker development decisions. It's always a can of worms.

Happy Friday! ALL