Thiel Owners

I've been informed that the 'teardrop cone' woofer was indeed a development prototype. It seems that a calendar year elapsed between that prototype shown at the January 2006 CES press conference, and the actual shipment of the finished 'star-plane' product in early 2007. It seems reasonable that much of that time was consumed by iterating the flat star-plane version of the concept along with its necessary crossover implementation, which would include midrange and possibly tweeter XO changes because the woofer acoustic hole went away. I bet the final XO was simpler.

I presume that the acoustic launch plane of the star plane would be farther forward than the teardrop cone prototype. Time alignment would require a different baffle angle - but the cabinet seems unchanged. There is no analog time delay in the XO (as there was in the CS5.) Much remains mystery to me.  

tomthiel

Thank You for the detective work in reference to the "Teardrop Cone" design. Could the image/speaker in question have indeed been a Prototype for CES press conference? 

Then the Star-Plane (wavy) cone design rolled out at a later date?

Happy Listening!

Yes, that's what I am told by David Cubine who was our long-term in-house publicity and customer service man. Dave says that photo was taken at that press conference. Note the passive radiator has the later 'star plane' diaphragm (names are mine.) Seems that Jim found a way to marry the voice coil to the star plane and eliminate the undesirable pocket made by the cone.

I don’t think there are any teardrop cone speakers out in the wild. The pair that I saw at Thiel / Lexington in 2012 was #1 & 2 which went to shows, lived in the showroom, etc. It had two identical-looking star-plane diaphragms.

Grill on or off ?  While Tom took some measurements on his SCS4 speakers and found very little difference in sound and jafant listened to his CS2.4 speakers and found no difference in sound so I can only speculate that the improvement  I am hearing is do to either the design difference in the steel protective grill of the 2.7 (and 3.7 ) or the design of the flat coaxial speaker in both models and it's interaction with the grill design .  I agree with Tom on grills off during listening or at least try it if you haven't .

I agree with jafant that the speakers look better with the grill on , if only the woofer on the 2.4 and 2.7 were black !