Thiel Owners

I suppose I could mount the external crossovers on a pair of amp stands  But I’d rather not.

I'd rather you not as well. I want to address the relevant aspects of sophisticated performance and physical vibration control is a real as well as manageable issue.

What about modifications to the driver mounting?  Guessing there is a better term, but a gasket for vibration absorption?  Thinner for higher frequency drivers and thicker for lower frequency drivers.  Air tight.  Installation might be tricky (over torqued if an elastic material used) and the design potentially complex.  Might provide some decoupling of the driver.  

I have been using brass fasteners for many years.

Here is a useful video as to the how and why. I know he moved back to Canada. TomD. https://youtu.be/piWxZK_9hyQ

anzen - lots of interacting variables and solution visions. Among those is de-coupling which Thiel rejected. Thiel’s vision landed on maximizing the connection between the driver and cabinet to reduce recoil, increase effective mass and stiffness to tighten the onset transient wave-form. Early-on we used a thin gasket-paper interface. As we developed precision CNC machining we eliminated that gasket by using an O-ring at the ID of the mounting rabbet as an air seal. The mechanical joint was driver to baffle with no interface. It seems that later (after TT) products migrated to a very thin foam interface that essentially collapses under mechanical load while forming an air seal. In all cases Thiel attempted to unify the driver with the baffle for maximum rigidity.

The opposite approach of ’floating’ the driver with its claims of resonance isolation may have merit, but I never found it in total system analysis. The decoupled driver vibrates more and longer than the coupled one and its recoil is far greater - producing transient slur. I should note that such slur is without much consequence when a speaker’s onset transient is already compromised via non-coherence. But a coherent waveform begs the brain to figure out what’s wrong with the slurred leading edge, and that 'work' decreases musical intimacy.

Another problem with de-coupled drivers is keeping them tight. A vibration-absorbing gasket permits relative motion between the basket and baffle. That motion induces loosening of the fasteners - a very bad deal.

So, Thiel unitized (as much as we could) the vibro-mechanical system of drivers and cabinet. The cabinet-floor interface is another very complex equation to solve. Stand by for future reports on that front.