Thiel Owners

It's been a while since I measured it, but I think it's 17' x 23' but the treatment takes up 6" on all sides, so the floor measures 16' by 22'. The speakers are on a short wall and behind the camera is a small grand piano & music stands, guitar amps, & chair.

After many years my Proceed Amp2 died and I replaced with a NAD M23. Preamp is a Pass Labs X1 that I bought used many yrs ago. Until a couple weeks ago, I was playing everything through a Mark Levinson 360S DAC, but something changed on the digital stream coming from the Sonos Port and the DAC started applying de-emphasis on everything. So I added a Lumin T3 streamer/DAC. I can still play CDs through the 360S & even send spdif from the Lumin to the 360S if I want to A/B the various D/A conversion options, which is kind of fun. The pic was taken before I added the Lumin T3.

Cables are Music Metre Canto (balanced from 360S > X1 and X1 > M23. The Lumin > X1 is using balanced Audioquest I forget what it was called and I'm out of town today.

barnett - nice system. What is the ceiling height to the actual, hard ceiling?

Thanks! Ceiling is 11 feet and I forgot to add the cables to speakers are Audioquest that I bought with the speakers. I forget what they called it, but they are gray color about 1" thick.

Tom, my listening room is nowhere as magnificent as the other room you are commenting on. My listening room is a family room off the kitchen and unfortunately has an open doorway a few feet in front of speaker and 8 ft to the side going to the living room with the rear remainder being open to the kitchen with a 3 ft high wood cabinet granite top seating area. The other walls are enclosed. Room is 20 ft wide with speakers 1 ft from back wall and centered on wall 6 ft apart. The depth of the room is 18 ft and I am sitting 11 ft from the speakers. I know I am violating the equilateral triangle rule. I need to rearrange wall and  move speakers a little further apart 8 ft and move closer to speakers 9 ft. Typical ceiling height of 7.5 ft and is a popcorn finish. The walls are wood paneling over studs with no drywall or plasterboard underneath. Flooring is ceramic tile and there are NO acoustic treatments. I thought my tweeters went bad, not the case, I tried different speakers and amplifier.  Thiels are not the problem.  I think I have the worst listening room parameters. Maybe an area rug in front of speakers to begin.  The kitchen is 14 x 12 ft. Does this space also get counted in overall area since the sound energy is mostly unobstructed to this area. You may have to read this more than once, but I wanted to paint a complete picture, without actually sending a picture. I'm also interested in comments from anyone about Parasound 2125 V 2 since I like on off trigger and would rather buy new. Thanks for your comments.

barnett - a couple of thoughts about CS2.2s in your room.

The room is wonderfully designed. Congratulations on however you got there. The dimensions are right in the middle of the Bolt Pattern which allows for leeway regarding the contribution of your diffusion panels on the side walls. Also the Bonello Modes stack up very nicely with increasing density per third-octave frequency rise. All good for a musical-sounding space from most anywhere in it.

The picture gets murkier when considering bass, and especially adding a subwoofer. Many of your bass modes fall on whole-notes and intervals which will be accentuated and long-lasting when stimulated. Specifically you have reinforcement modes at 24, 33, 41, 49 Hz (rounded) which fall on notes at A=440Hz. By the way, they fall off-note as the room width acts smaller than 17’. It’s hard to predict exactly how your diffusers affect the functional width of the room.

These modes will definitely be made more troublesome by adding subwoofer(s) bass extension. Those will not be very responsive to equalization. So consider tunable absorption devices to address those issues.

A word about the CS2.2. Bass runs out of steam with a hard ’splat’ when driven hard with bass content. John Atkinson proclaimed in his initial review that the passive radiator and/or woofer was bottoming. He bought and used CS2.2s personally for a few years until the bass problem got the better of him. He is a bass guitarist after all. That speculation turns out to be false. The problem is real, but it fixed itself when I took the crossovers outboard for redevelopment. That ’splat’ is part of an overall veil-shimmer-overload that is part of the CS2.2. It goes away (quite gloriously) with EMF management. If outboarding crossovers is too much, I’m also working on a set of inboard solutions centering on moving the crossover(s) from behind the woofer to the bottom of the cabinet (where they should have been all along.)

Plenty to chew on here. Have fun.

Tom