Thiel Owners

@tomthiel ,@beetlemania

Thank you.. 

tomthiel,

Excuse me if this has been asked as there are too many post in this discussion to read everyone. 

Regarding the CS2.7 are there any cap upgrades? If so what values?

Duramax - the 2.7 has been talked about informally. As the last of the True Thiel designs it is very mature and, unlike other products including the 1.6 and 3.7, XO manufacturer didn't go to China. Thiel made those in-house with traditional Thiel parts best-of-form parts. There are a couple of upgrade opportunities.

1: The midrange has a single 400uF electrolytic feed cap, which Jim would never have done. That cap can be replaced with by 4 @ 100uF high grade electrolytics. Or, I have designed a 100uF CSA 160 volt which will clarify the midrange but take more room than this layout will handle.

2: The tweeter feed has a 15uF + 1uF PP which can be replaced by a CSA or Purity 16uF to good advantage. That by itself would be the largest upgrade and lowest hanging fruit. There are also shunts to common in the tweeter circuit that would benefit in a small way. The 68uF electrolytic up to a CSA and the 1.5uF PP to a PUR.

However, the 2.7 is extremely refined for what it is, so it's way down the list for upgrading. I could get these components with my next CC R&D order, as well as the 2.4 caps that Pieter is asking about.

Tom , beetle and pieper

Wouldn't upgrading the 2.4 value caps to Clarity CMR's be rewarding enough  ?

duramax

I will be installing a Clarity CMR 1.5uf  , a MR 8.2uf on and a Mundorf 68uf electrolytic on the woofer bd. I also got one of those for the tweeter bd.  , If parts connextion has 8 Mundorfs in stock I will be replacing the 400uf topcon with 4 of the 100uf's on the mid bd. , Space is tight but I think I'll be using CMR 1uf on both the tweeter and mid boards as soon as they have another 20% off sale . I haven't found a small enough size electrolytic to replace the ERSE pulseX 15uf's .

Wouldn't upgrading the 2.4 value caps to Clarity CMR's be rewarding enough  ?
 

If I understand @tomthiel correctly, the PUR is an upgrade of the CSA and the CMR is also upgraded. So, yeah, CMR would be very rewarding if your wallet is that thick. In early discussions with Tom, I advocated using CMR at least as bypasses. Every report I’ve read indicated better sonics from CMR compared to CSA. Getting full capacitance, however, in CMR for a Thiel XO would be wallet crushing. Tom gently steered me to CSA which is more in line with the Thiel ethos regarding performance/value. Tom had CMR that I could have auditioned as the 1% bypasses on the coax feeds but I was exhausted of comparisons by that time and I was already thrilled with the sonics from CSA bypassed with Multicaps.

So, PUR is an improved CSA at about 20% added cost. CMR is probably still better than PUR? But a 10 uF CSA 630 V is $22.13 at Parts Connexion whereas the same in CMR is $91.78. So, if PUR gets you most of CMR sonics at a fraction of the price . . .