help thiel 2.4 placement???
place them where you ears tell you they sound best. you might want to start at 6" and move them out from the wall in 2" increments until you find the best place. my 2.3's are about a foot from the wall. i think it is more important to have ample distance between the listener and the speaker than the distance between the speaker and the wall. |
The thiel manuals are usually helpful and can be downloaded from www.thielaudio.com. The screamingly obvious response to your post is that 6 feet apart is quite wrong. I have owned several Thiels and all operate best at about nine feet apart, and there is a distance apart where moving them further apart causes the sound to go a little lean in the mid-bass, and moving them closer together causes the mid bass to get a little too warm. With Thiel's in my room that ideal spot was with the speakers between 2.6 and 2.7 metres apart. Smaller Thiels liked the 2.6 metre point (eg. 1.5 and 1.6). The 3.5, 2.3 and 2.4 liked 2.7 metres apart. I would suggest the following. Position the speakers close to the back wall (such as your 1 foot away position) and 2.65 metres apart (pardon my confused metric/imperial state), with no toe-in. Listen to the Thiels from between 10 and 11 feet away. Listen to them in that position and then bring them towards you say 4 to 6 inches at a time, moving your listening position back accordingly. Choose a piece of music that has a well recorded solo vocalist imaging centrally between the speakers. As you move the speakers away from the back wall, the overall soundstage should gain in coherence and in depth, and the vocals should become more natural (less flat and hard) up to a point where the image of the vocalist begins to lose solidity and focus. This should not occur until the speakers are at least 3 feet away from the back wall. Then move the speakers back towards the back wall until you get a solid central image again. Then move the speakers to say 2.6 metres apart, and then out to 2.7 metres apart listening for how the overall character gains or loses coherence. At this point you should be getting a good feel of how to inch the speakers around within this zone to get a good soundstage, solid images and good top-to-bottom coherence (ie. similar levels of driness or warmness through the frequency spectrum). Finally, play around with sitting closer or further away, together with small amounts of toe-in. In general i have always preferred to have Thiel's firing straight ahead, but some rooms require a small amount of toe-in, mainly when the need to have them 9 feet apart causes them to be a bit close to side walls. Throughout this process, I would not be listening to the bass much, except when trying the "move together/apart" positions, and when moving your listening position forward and back. If you have a very wide back wall you might try moving both speakers left/right (ie. keeping their distance apart constant) to get a smooth bass response - symmetric positioning is usually best with a narrow back wall, but not necessarily so with a wide back wall. If all this results in poor bass, then I would look at other walls to locate the speakers on, or elsewhere for the problem. For example I cannot imagine the sound of Thiels being good at 1 foot from the back wall, regardless of what that does to bass level - soundstage would be horrible and vocals would be nasal and flat. I cannot help but ask whether the speakers have had 500 hours of use yet. Thiel's 1.6 and 2.4 take a long time before the bass arrives. Even at 300 hours the bass may not have arrived, depending on how hard you have driven them. Believe me the 2.4 has plenty of bass, but it is quite absent when the speakers are new, and it arrives all of a sudden after 300 to 500 hours of play. Only then can you really do the work to set them up right. |
Nice post Redkiwi. From my experience with the larger Thiels, they do like their breathing room between the speakers. Typically, setting up an equilateral triangle with speaker, speaker, listener is a good starting point. I've noticed that the Thiel's need more space between them and the back wall than between them and the side wall. I believe it's normally best to keep those distances different from one another (e.g., the front center of the driver should not be both 4 feet from the front and 4 feet from the side wall). Trust your ears since general rules may not apply to your particular acoustic environment or to your tastes. Experiment as both Redkiwi and Jazzdude suggest. By the way, both location and degree of toe-in will matter as will, with Thiels, speaker cones between them and the floor. Good luck. |
thanks for your answers, because my room is 12 ft by 15 ft, i could only place them 6 ft apart (because of the door of the room), but toninght i will have to change the whole set up of the room so i can position them 8-9 feet apart and 2-3 feet from the rear wall and 2 feet from the side wall, listening posistion would be 9 ft away. from that position i will start to move them around and look for the best set up. |
That should help tremendously. I have my 2.4's a little farther apart then Redkiwi suggests (maybe one foot more) but I also have them toe'd in quite a lot. (I tend to favor toe in because I like focus and prefer a small, focused soundstage to one that's bigger but more diffuse.) However, Redkiwi's advice is brilliant (as ususally) and I'm going to do some experiementing. |
Slight clarification. I meant to say that isolation cones attached to the bottom of the speakers and affixed to the floor or metal pucks add a lot to the character of Thiels. That's what I meant by "speaker cones between them and the floor". These are typically solid brass cones with the flat side attached to the speaker via a threaded cylinder (i.e., bolt without the head) and with the spiked side toward the floor. The impact on the CS-6's was spectacular and immediately evident. Send me an email if you would like more details. |
Yes. I opted for brass cones/discs because: 1) They looked a lot nicer and that appealed to my wife, 2) I was able to purchase brass pucks with the cones so did not have to leave permanent marks on my wood floor, and 3) By the time I ordered the cones/pucks, I'd forgotten that Thiel shipped the spikes with their speakers (they were in the box). Well, what can I say??? However, I did try the Thiel spikes later with the pucks and didn't like them quite as much (though they are certainly better than no spikes at all). Good catch. Since the cones/pucks weren't very expensive, I continue to recommend them. But, no reason not to try the spikes first, especially on carpet (I'm still not crazy about leaving holes in the wood floor). Thanks Zaikes. |
Hi @rcoppel My room is about 14' x 23'. In stereo mode, the speakers are about 8' apart tweeter-to-tweeter, and 4.5' off the front wall. I am sitting almost 10' tweeter-to-ear. I can confirm tonight. I'm not worried about the sides as I'm absorbing the first reflection. I've pissed around with different placement (including moving the chairs), but this seems to be the one that offers the best balance and imaging, in my room. You can see it in Virtual Systems. Good luck. Warren |
Shane Buettner wrote in the Audio Perfectionist Journal: Hope this helps. Warren |
