Thiel Owners

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 !

The first step in building a nice sounding systems, is to make sure all the elements of your system are set up correctly and efficiently by performing a number of verification measurements. This video will give you some ideas.

Using Key Measurements to Verify Basic System Setup

Deer Creek Audio is a miniDSP authorized dealer

My 3.7s definitely sound better with the grills off. In fact, I'm unable to distinguish the occasional sounds from the environment from that which comes from the speakers. It's that good.