Thiel Owners

jafant - No retail space in the cards. Open studio space still a couple of dim possibilities. Workspace is materializing a little at a time.

sdl4 - distortion profiles are intriguing. More generally various forms of aural masking are intriguing. The aural cortex does somersaults to create the mental image we call ’hearing’. The entire chain from live event to listened experience is convoluted. I am committed to Jim’s approach that those factors are the business of those links in the chain. Unraveling and/or compensating for such problems downstream carries its own down-sides. Many products do just that: compensate for upstream deficiencies. One cost is that some sort of signal resolution or fidelity suffers. Philosophically, I would prefer Nelson to work on reducing upper-harmonic distortion rather than masking it with added lower harmonic distortion, which is more distortion, not less.

I should insert a life-long noticing that distortion is quite often a preference, in sound as in much of life.

I’ll also add that DMP’s founder Tom Jung used CS5s as mastering monitors because they helped him find and minimize those upstream artifacts which conversely would remain invisible via masking by downstream products in the service of ’sounding better’.

More later.

Funny side note

I was looking at HiFi equipment sales in Portland Oregon 

and at Fred's sound of music they still have Thiel Audio 

listed under New Components !

I think you're right to question where in the chain to try to fix or compensate for problems in music reproduction. It would seem to make sense to fix things as far upstream as possible, but that isn't always easy to do. 

With regard to Nelson Pass, I watched a YouTube video of an interview he did with Steve Guttenberg that mentioned the distortion profile issues briefly. Nelson was careful to state that he didn't actually add second or third harmonic distortion to some of his amps. Instead, he simply chose not to suppress those lower order distortions as much as he could have in the circuit design. 

For my own listening, I don't look at ultra-low distortion specs in an amp as a sign of sonic purity if those specs are associated with any harshness or brightness in the sound quality I hear at the downstream end of the chain. But adding in a lot of extra distortion doesn't seem like an ideal design strategy either.    

@tomthiel, the impedance limits of an amp depends on the speakers attached to it. Most later floor mounted Thiels from the 1.7's / 2.3's / 3.6's / 5's / 6's / 7's have a  minimum power recommendation of 100 Watts per channel into 8 Ohms. The nominal impedance of all these speakers is at least 4 Ohms. We all know the actual minimum impedance can be less than that, and quite often for more than just a slight dip.

Models | The Coherent Source (wordpress.com)

The Benchmark amp in stereo mode is spec'd at 100 Watts per channel into 8 Ohms and is not able to keep up with doubling down even into 4 Ohms, just missing the minimum recommended 200 Watts into the nominal impedance. Things get a bit worse as we work down into actual minimum impedances, as rather than reaching the recommended 300 Watts into 3 Ohms the Benchmark comes up short at 240 Watts per channel. In Bridged mono mode the Benchmark isn't even spec'd below 6 Ohms.

Benchmark AHB2 Power Amplifier - Benchmark Media Systems

With the right speakers the Benchmark might well nigh be the most perfect amps available. They might work beautifully with some older legacy Thiels, or with the Thiels that are not floor standers, but I think there are more suitable options for the more recent Thiel floor standers.