Thiel Owners

I removed the steel door that covers my breaker panel box which is located in my audio room. With 2 friends present I did a door on door off  listening test. Obvvious improvement every time with panel off. Steel will alter the flux field as a signal travels a copper wire. Same as I found replacing steel fasteners with brass holding drivers ,tweeters ,crossovers and circuit board  fasteners.. Any ferrous material will bend or alter a signal path . Generates interfering energy. TomD

Tom - Thiel had gone to non-magnetic (stainless steel) screws by 2007 SCS4. I don't know when / which other products migrated to non-magnetic screws. I had verified (and taken to heart) your observation regarding non-ferrous connectors.

Today's biggest (repeat) lesson is that XO networks don't belong behind a driver, whether shielded or not.

Tom - my thoughts are that having  a steel grill even a mesh  in front of a driver with a very powerfull neo magnetic field will alter the inductance of the coil as it moves between the magnetic field . The steel in front will bend the intended field. TomD

If a crossover is mounted to the floor base of the cabinet it will be closer to mechanical ground and then resonace will be more easily drained. Plus the mounting of the crossover to the backwall is like a backboard on a basketball goal. Bouncey bounce. TomD

The mechanical issues are real and worth improving upon.

However, I believe the far larger issue is the interaction of the crossover components with the fields emanating from the driver(s), especially the woofer. These interactions and their sonic effects are not subtle. I had previously noted here that the CS2.2 qualities of 'hoodedness' and bass-transient overload (which sounded like a hard, mechanical splat) went away when taking the XO out of the cabinet and spreading out its components.

The present experiments on the SCS4 move the XO network from a densely packed panel on the back, behind the coax (in a high EMF bath) to either A: outboard with same layout, for testing, or B: split into separate woofer and tweeter boards, mounted on edge with shock-mounts on the cabinet bottom. EMF is more than an order of magnitude lower in the new location, plus mechanical vibration is reduced to near nil - and throw in qualitatively better thermal management for kix.