Thiel Owners

Brayeagle - thanks. I also confirmed with Rob that the SS2.2 is all Jim's design, updated by an improved amplifier.
Unsound - I don't know. The motor and coil could be the same, but the surround, spider - compliance in general, and moving system mass would have to be altered. It would be a piece of cake for Jim to modify such a woofer, and could also be done by SEAS, etc. But, as usual, a stable forward-reaching company would have to take on such an endeavor, DIY couldn't in my opinion.
Robrink - sorry that I missed it. I gather that you have 03As. Well worth upgrading. I remember those plinths as made from Baltic Birch, which could be repaired by a local cabinet shop.

I believe that a peer would have been good for him, his products, his company, and its future. But he never found that place. We all make our way the best we can. Thiel Audio carried him pretty well.

Unsound - again I agree. I suppose “maddening” is the word I would attach to Jim’s insistence on such low impedances.

We have not yet developed a maintenance solution, but are working on it.

Unsound - you've got me thinking . . . I've been considering the 3.6 as the terminal discrete driver iteration of the model 3. But it might be more rightly thought of as a transition product between the sealed-bass "pure 3s" and the reflex bass "new 3s". The CS3 and 3.5 were, if I remember correctly, identical except for the midrange driver with its crossover tweaks, and the single jacks. The CS3 mid was too fragile and the more robust 3.5 mid was in fact a full-range driver. Any upgrades to the 3.5 could be applied to the 3 as well, creating perhaps a 3.5r (renaissance) as the next "pure 3". Combined, about 7500 pair or 'pure 3s' were sold. We know some of them survive on this forum and my "new" pair in the studio. How many do you think are out there?

Unsound - an interesting thing about the 3.6 is that the drivers and XO are extremely well developed. The specs are great. However, it is the product where I identified the "hard glare" which I have been working to ameliorate with surface flow technologies. An updated 3.6 may perhaps be the easiest products to upgrade. Or so it seems at least until it gets on the bench.

Unsound- for many reasons, I am starting with old models. The 3.6 is good and stable without my ministrations for the time being.

Rockrink - The original 03A woofers were made my Eminence, the sound reinforcement manufacturer. They had stamped steel baskets, foam surrounds, and (I think I remember) square ceramic magnets.

Rockrink - on further remembering, we reinforced the 03A woofer baskets with epoxy. Rob at CSS might have original drivers or rebuild kits.

Hmmm

Rockrink - Rob is always super busy, so I hesitate to offer him as a solution. Generally he will respond if he has a solution for you. The 0 series products are more than 40 years gone, so I don't know. As a long-shot speculation, Eminence Speaker Company is alive and well in Eminence Kentucky and MIGHT have records. The 03 and 03a from 1978 to 1983 shared the same woofer. It may have been the same or different woofer as the 01, 01a, 01b. They might know. 

Jayant - the hotrod garage is growing to take over another workbench and use of the finishing room. It’s a slippery slope!

Rosami - your detailed comparison of the 2.4 vs 3.6 reads like the design brief for the two products.

The Renaissance Project work has illuminated ways to make qualitative improvements for all Thiel models. I especially thank members of this forum for raising questions and perspectives that I, nor probably Jim, had considered. Remember the Vandersteen baffleless question? I responded with the company line of "one baffle, like one instrument". Then I scratched my head and went to work finding holes in my incomplete thinking. All in, I am addressing forms of distortion that contribute to that "upper frequency harsh glare" which I attribute to the speaker in some degree. Most of you have ameliorated it with careful and expensive system engineering. Thiel audio also used that particular equipment and sources that made it sound good. I believe we'll find ways to allow Thiel speakers to shine with most equipment and sources rather than a small subset as is presently necessary. 

I also thank those of you who are running parallel experiments and sharing outcomes with me. Even though progress is slow, progress is being made.

Hello all - I join in thanking JAFant for running this forum. I doubt that I would have taken up the challenge of trying to stabilize the future for Thiel owners without this forum. It's been a wonderful undertaking and I make some progress nearly every day.

Unsound - I can shed some historical light on your query of "what would Jim Thiel do?" Jim's thinking was decidedly compartmentalized. He considered his business that of designing loudspeakers and the other elements to get right were the business of other entities - designers, technologies, etc.

We started with the Phase Linear 400 and then Nelson Pass' Threshold, then Classé, and gradually developed trade relationships whereby we swapped speakers for the best of form from Audio Research, Conrad Johnson, Mark Levinson, and Krell. (There were undoubtedly others after I left in the mid 90s.) I know that the xx.7 series were developed primarily with Krell's 600fpb.

I remember vividly a visit from Larry Archibald (then incoming publisher of Stereophile magazine) where we demonstrated, among other models, our new CS1.2, with underhung, shunted motor, aluminum tweeter and other advanced-for-the-time technologies. All were quite impressed. The speakers sold for (approximately) $1500 / pair and the amps driving them were (prox) $15K. Larry argued the "marketplace absurdity" of such a pairing. Jim argued that good amplification was his assumption for his designs.
I would classify Jim as unassailable or incorrigible in the realm of his assessments, his assumptions and beliefs regarding such matters. And that was problematic within the company. Company politics demanded that Jim was always right, so all products were developed with relatively "great" amplification. (An inexpensive product might be developed with a $10K amp and an expensive on with a $20K amp, etc.) The same thinking applied to cables. And as you might know, our listening room was purpose built at 14' high x 22.5 wide x 35' long with low-key but very effective acoustic treatment. So, let's say that the working environment of our speakers under development and test was somewhere between great and rarely reproducible in our customers' real-life situations.

Both Larry Archibald and Harry Pearson in his original 03 review took Jim to task for his compartmentalized position, as have numerous later critics either directly or indirectly. Most of you as fans have carefully and painstakingly worked around these interface problems. Congratulations to you. Jim would be pleased for you and proud of your ingenuity. But it wouldn't have altered his position of "that's not my job". 
Note that there were other amps after my time. Dave Gordon, Thiel's national sales manager from the late 80s to late 90s would know them all, both at Thiel and in the field.

In my present work I am considering real life application environments. My amps and cables and room are quite modest and quite likely bettered by many of your environments. Among the lessons I have heeded is that there are problems attributable to the speakers which can be ameliorated in the speakers rather than shifting responsibility to source or chain. There is always more to learn, and I am immensely enjoying this learning experience.

I would love the opportunity to hear any Ayre amp on any Thiel speaker, especially with coaching from you guys.
I've been told that Jim greatly appreciated Ayre's products.

As a Modus Operandi, Thiel's listening always guided our work and led the way toward solutions. Measurements were taken to make sure that the audible improvements were valid and to guard against the paths of seduction where one or some elements might be improved at the expense of other elements. That was not acceptable in Thieldom.

In my present Laminar Launch investigation, I am honoring Jim's approach and standards. I can make no change if it compromises some other measured elements. I am chasing a clearly audible improvement in inner harmonic detail and reduced harsh glare with large, complex signal. The improvements are real and verifiable with other listeners, and achievable via multiple subtly variant techniques. Presently I am using measurements to identify which combination of techniques produces the least compromise of measurable elements. A particularly interesting measurement is harmonic distortion. That envelope varies between -50dB and -100dB and the envelope is changed via different solutions. I intend to find the combination that both produces the desired sonic effects AND reduces harmonic distortion, smooths group delay, quiets the waterfall thumbprint and flattens frequency response. By ear alone, I would be lost, since 4 different solutions have produced pleasing results, all demonstratibly better than stock. I'm zeroing in on a best choice.

This MO is what we practiced at Thiel Audio, although my explorations go beyond what our budgets of time and cost would have allowed.

Even earlier history - Steve ran the Mod Squad in the late 80s, early 90s where he kept abreast of evolving digital technologies, offering substantial performance upgrades to CD players (primarily). The Mod Squad's niche dissipated as digital filters and topologies improved. Then came McCormack Audio, etc.

Of interest here is that the C1 is a first order design. Thanks for the wonderful report!

Robert - I know a little about those add-on filters. I spoke with the maker, who would only say that he is fixing known problems with the 3.7 upper frequencies, as well as with Rob at CSS, and we ran a cost thumbnail. The Stereophile review near-field response shows a rough rising high end and the undamped oil-can tweeter resonance. Jim let that ring due to its out of band frequency and that the required notch filter imparts a veil on the whole sound. The low-treble roughness is, in my opinion, in the time domain and primarily an artifact of near-field measurement. In other words, it will not be fixed by more XO circuitry which modifies the frequency domain. Note also Stereophile’s averaged listener-position graphs, which show no hint of that alleged roughness.

Rob and I looked at the parts vs retail selling price and determined that those parts, if of Thiel quality, would cost more than his asking price for the assembled unit. So, he is inserting coils, caps, resistors and wire of lower quality, which quite probably reduces global transparency.

Neither I myself, nor Rob to my knowledge, has heard the mod. Plus, he may be doing more or differently than what I’m saying. It would be instructive to hear direct experience. But at this point we would not recommend it.

Prof - that was a great review EXCEPT that both John and Larry included the statement that they couldn't get the CS5 to sing. That product sold poorly and didn't pay back its R&D costs; Jim was discouraged and dropped the idea of deep sealed bass. By the way, Rob has retrofitted CS5s with dual inputs to raves from the customers. Taking the deep bass killer low impedance burden off the main amplifier solves tons of amp  issues. Also, I have imagined a physical solution to staggering the drivers on the baffle to eliminate the two bucket brigade delays on the upper and lower midrange circuits and thus radically simplifying the feed circuits for those critical drivers. At that time Jim was convinced that those custom styrene caps and high purity coils were sonically invisible. I have my doubts from my present-day perspective.

I wouldn't mind finding a CS5i pair for the hot-rod garage. 

Tomic - Thiel's early approach was to strive for a product line where the primary delineater was bass extension. Bigger products with deeper bass for bigger rooms. It seems that Jim wandered away from that approach in that the later 2s and 3s go nearly as deep as the 6s and 7s. My experience is that sealed bass with its 2nd order roll-off tends to pressurize rooms more than vented bass with its 4th order roll-off. So, perhaps the game changed. The market certainly did with homage being paid to Home Theater.

As a historical note, my original farmhouse, 5 miles up Georgetown Road from the factory had a more normal listening room, which we used as a cross check in product development. The Victorian farmhouse's room was 10' high x (about) 18' wide x 18' deep with a bay window-wall behind the speakers. Plaster on wood lath walls and ceiling, Hardwood floor. Transom openings above doors to 3 walls. Lovely sounding room. The 0 series was totally developed there, plus the CS2 and the CS3 and 3.5. By the mid 80s we had added a modest room in the Nandino Blvd factory, but used both rooms simultaneously. The CS5 development in 1988ish used the new, big factory listening room. We continued to have a playback system at Georgetown Road, along with band instruments set-up for live vs recorded music and jams with traveling musicians.

Just as with electronics, Jim considered the room to be the users' problem and playground. He balanced for 'average' rooms without consideration for standing waves, etc. Some dealers cracked the code and sold lots of speakers. Many users never figured out how to optimize, and generally blamed the speakers.

Beetle - JA's testing procedure was dictated by physical / budget constraints. Fair enough. In the early years he explained how / in what ways his measurements were misconstruing the truth. But as time went on, he spoke as though the anomalies from his procedural limitations were real, such as not mentioning that anomaly A, B, Etc. would vanish at a 2.5 or 3 meter listening distance. He also gravitated toward language showing how his measurements confirmed or related to the reviewer's listening notes, rather than the actual parameters of the product under test. This editorial drift smacks of publisher's demands for internal self-legitimization. JA certainly has the knowledge and experience to understand the territory, and the linguistic skills to explain it well. Whereas founder Gordon Holt and second publisher Larry Archibald were true music and gear lovers, it doesn't seem like the subsequent publishers had service of music as their driving principle.

Tomic - we don't have that scan adapter, but it is indeed affordable. Thiel was always going for pistonic driver behavior and the wavy drivers take that way up. I have an associate who could make the wavy drivers in carbon at a real-world price. Wouldn't that be something?
JFant - Jim's rig was trashed. Rob got New Thiel's Klippel, which is very good stuff.

Regarding measurements - some of you have probably seen Jim's setup. It was home-brew, but quite extensive. Of interest is that the swept sine wave told more about some aspects, and his "bleeper" which was 1/3 octave tone-bursts, told different aspects more clearly, and pink noise again a different shade of meaning. He correlated these chamber tests with outdoor normal plane and ground plane and up-firing from the sand pit. Part of his witches' brew was how he weighed and rolled with all those variants. When we went to the listening room, he would spread out graphs so that he and we could correlate different aspects with what we heard . . and make progress decisions.

Of note is that when New Thiel took over, they trashed Jim's gear and replaced it with a Klippel rig. Rob now has that rig, but neither of us has approached it yet.

Tomic - my friend was an early entry for aerospace and aircraft parts. And he's committed to the Love of Music, and he really knows his stuff. That's about as firm as we are at this time.

There are lots of reasons to not care about pistonic diaphragms. They are extremely difficult and expensive and higher order slopes don't care all that much.

George, yes we did. Jim was very mathematically oriented. The TS parameters were quite new when we began, and I doubt we would have tried speakers without them. Our first drivers were from Eminence and Long Engineering, whom we cajoled Into deriving the TSPs, which was a kick in the pants for them, a solid starting place for us, and the 01, 02 and O3s were unbelievable for their time due to hard , predictive engineering rather than progressive guesses, which was the order of the day.

Snbeall - the upgrade project is making progress every day, but the reports are lean due to legal / ownership uncertainties, which I never expected to take this long to work out. All products can be improved with better passive components, but the newer the products, the less bang for buck. Stay tuned. Use the PPs as-is.

The PP1.2 was my first approach to modern Thiels, after using my 2.2s for decades as mix-master evaluation tools. The PP1.2 blows me away, just as they are, and even more so with component upgrades. I haven't yet tried my emerging "Laminar Launch" technology on it, but its already-small and round form factor may be the best of the Thiel batch in its stock form. Stay tuned.

Regarding subwoofer - the PP benefits the most of all, since its bass was never intended as a stand-alone, and its roll out is critically damped 2nd order and optimized for subwoofer mating. My best results are by hanging the PPs on the ceiling (as recommended in the User Guide), and placing a subwoofer against the front wall, below each PP. The room-tuning sets on Thiel SmartSubs provide compensation for the wall or corner reinforcement.

A big deal is that the PP makes no floor or ceiling bounce as there always is with floor-standers. The ear-brain compensates wonderfully for those bounce interferences, but when they are absent, the sound becomes more natural. As you see, I'm a fan.

Tom - indeed Ed and his brother Bill were our source for the model 01 tweeter. They knew their stuff. We had hoped to work with Ed Long, and with Eminence as we developed our own drivers. But Ed wanted full design control (including XOs, etc.) which was a non-starter for us, and Eminence ran out of their depth early-on. At the time they could not source cast baskets, and were not interested in Jim's custom pole geometries and close tolerances and QC specs. Their attitude was that if it's good enough for Peavey, it should be good enough for you. Peavey was their principal customer and pretty demanding for the times, but home playback was a different league that they couldn't relate to. We found Vifa at their beginning and developed a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with them, until they ran out of depth and we took matters in-house in the mid 1990s. 

Peavey made their mark beginning in the 1960s with their high-powered, bulletproof amps and stage speaker cabinets at affordable prices. Hartley Peavey did it well. He saw opportunities and went for them. He kept his prices reasonable when big money bought Fender and other big stage players, quality went down and prices skyrocketed. Sound familiar?

One of my formative jobs after developing the production capacity for Thiel Audio, was Peavey’s development of Eddie VanHalen’s Wolfgang Guitar. I helped crack the code to reliably get the sound that Eddie wanted, based on wood particulars. I moved to New Hampshire to supply (over 5 years' time) 17,000 Birdseye Maple neck/fingerboard sets and Basswood bodies from wood that I personally selected in Northeast US and Canada, milled in New Hampshire, specially dried in Massachusetts, and sent on to Jeremy Kling (my godson) in Lexington to turn into matched sets for Peavey. Big job - got me into the high-end tonewood production business, traveling the world selecting wood from sustainable sources, including a sunken ship, typhoon and hurricane cleanups, Amazonian replant projects, deconstruction of a railroad trestle and old buildings, among others. What a trip.

I think that Peavey is chugging along nicely as an all-american innovative manufacturer with a good reputation and world-wide distribution.

Guys - when hot-rod mods become available, we intend to offer various levels of service, such as parts kits for the vigorous DIYs, pre-assembled crossovers to swap for your old ones, physical brace and baffle kits for the DIY, or send your speakers to Rob for him to do, and so forth and so on. There will be plenty of options.
Tom

Jon - Rob @ CSS can give you advice if needed.

Rob,
Is your wire a single twisted pair of 17.5 per leg?

Masi - my suggestion is that you are doing well with sspur. Also, this forum has lots of information going back a few years with answers to lots of your questions - and there are people here with first-hand experience to guide you. I have not formally addressed the 3.6 and would be speculating with anything I would say. SSpur, Beetlemania and others here have solid experience regarding brands and outcomes. I will chip in as I can find time.

@unsound - thank you again. I hear you and am eager to hear about other options. I came to Benchmark via recommendations from high-end recording folks, tried it and like it. I can't explain how or why it outperforms its expectations.

I did connect a dot or two around the power spec idiosyncrasy. Due to its feed-forward error correction topology, the amp simply can't function beyond the limits of that brick wall. It can't be rated at 1% distortion because it can't produce power with 1% distortion. 

Regarding protection: I learned that the flickering lights are merely warnings, not actual activation. That’s why ’it’ sounds so transparent - it’s not actually going into protection.

If protection is activated, a restart is required. That's happened twice, once by intentionally pushing it hard and the other time due to a cable short-circuit, where I was glad to have it.

 

Rob - I’ll get some measurements on my various wires. However, the resistance is not the whole story. In fact, audibility is a result of many factors and many of those are phase related. Two parallel tracks. A: lower resistance will change the frequency balance where it is operative, and B: all the other reflectances, skin effect, eddy currents, differential dialectic absorption, etc. will change many subtle things that audiophiles hear, but the engineering field ignores as insignificant. I suspect that more of interest is going on in B than in A. But changes in A must be corrected to maintain proper frequency balance.

As a historic note, Jim’s working rule was that focused listeners can hear 1/10 dB at an octave bandwidth. Lots of effort went into determining 1/10dB octave to octave frequency balance - anechoic flat. So he was bothered when "people" judged his speakers as having too much or too little of whatever frequency range. The intent was to be flat. Our fans tended to agree. Our detractors often criticized too little mid-bass and too much mid-treble.

My present experiments with wire and components and layout and baffle launch, etc. tend to rectify those criticisms without changing the measured frequency response. In other words, the criticisms may be caused by factors other than actual measured output. Of course, I don’t have a way to reliably measure differences of 1/10dB, so I’m flying far more blind than Jim was. Nonetheless progress is being made.

JA - So much to learn, so little time.
Rob - Your 2.7 wire was a New Thiel addition or experiment. They hired first-rate designers and engineers, so I trust it was very well considered and chosen. Their failure was at the executive, not technical level. We here did a parallel vs twisted exploration and seemed to all prefer the parallel, including myself. I can’t go down that route because I lack the knowledge to crack the code. I know enough to know that there are many factors including radio frequency interference and capacitive coupling with stray fields that are much more problematic with parallel runs and solved by twisted runs. Note that your stranded wire quite likely has the the stranding twisted to minimize coupling. So it would be a hybrid, quite different than parallel runs of solid wire.

Regarding your Cardas wire - that sounds optimum to me. All insulations, including Thiel’s teflon, introduce dielectric effects. Varnish is considered optimum. Also cotton and other cellulitic fibers are considered optimum - better than any of the plastics including teflon. AntiCables has built a respected product around varnish only. Morrow uses varnished strands in cotton. I find both those produces very satisfying. I don’t personally know Cardas’ results, but they have a very good reputation and I say he’s on an optimum path with what you describe.

The Cardas wire you describe could be ganged ie single pair for tweeter (or double for star quad), and ganged as double or triple for the other drivers. Need can be predicted via crossover analysis of the relative current capacity of the network - gauge of series inductors and parallel paths to ground. I would be glad to offer an opinion via PM.

coop - FWIW, Thiel owned and used the ML 23.5 / 27.5 extensively in the day. Many dealers successfully sold that ML / Thiel combination. It's a good match.

biannuzzi22 - I have some experience with the SS1 and SS2. Repair is an issue, I haven't found schematics yet. Low-level noise is an issue; if you need black quiet, maybe not. Performance is unique; the user has no control over amplitude. Jim's gig was to play back what's recorded. Some folks want more bass, which you can get by messing with the room boundary controls. The room boundary compensation really works. With the PXO, the main speakers work as hard as if solo, so you won't gain additional output capability.

I find their performance outstanding with the Passive OXs. I'm told that the active integrator is another league up. Biggest gains are with the smaller models having less extended bass. The 2.7 will get only a final bottom fundamental - surprisingly little content, but surprisingly satisfying musically.

As previously discussed in this forum, I really like stereo subs. We're not supposed to have directionality at those very low frequencies, but a pair sounds somehow more real (for only twice the price!). If solo, try to get it near the center. I use the subs with dynamic, big music and turn it off for solo and small ensemble vocal which has little to no sub bass, and the quiet is nice.

Thoft - a story for you. The 3.5 woofer is custom from Vifa, and built to handle a lot of power. However, the first production batch had nearly 50% woofer failures in the field. Turned out that Denmark had banned epoxy for health reasons and the substituted polyurethane didn't handle the heat. Very big deal, especially since customers had been waiting months for the model release. We got to the bottom of it rather quickly and our dealers were really supportive. Each replacement driver was sent with a copy of Michael Hedges Arial Boundaries album as an apology. Those albums were the best PR money we ever spent!

Michael heard about it and thanked us with an autographed first pressing. Great album. Sweet lemonade from bitter lemons.

Thoft - The 3.5 was introduced early 1986 and sold approximately 5,000 pairs until replaced by the 3.6 in 1992. Those first woofers failed immediately and were recalled and replaced free of any charge (plus the Hedges album). But heat failure presented constant trouble with all Thiel models, especially the equalized 01, CS3 and 3.5. Slow roll offs use more power and the equalizer worked the woofer far harder than any normal demands would place on it.

Now I'll conjecture a little. I don't know whether that voice coil is underhung - I kinda doubt it since Jim's involvement in finite element analysis only started around the mid 80s when the 3.5 was coming out. Irregardless, underhung voice coils produce 90% less distortion (of some forms), but their short, multi-layer (4 layers!) geometry inherently stores heat. Add to that extra heat the eddy current problems with aluminum voice coil formers which took Jim to using Nomex (which doesn't conduct heat) and you have a stacked deck for heat failures. Your separation is most likely from heat build-up for all these reasons. A re-cone has more advanced adhesives.

In my Thiel Renaissance (admittedly very slow) redevelopment work, thermal management is a serious area of attention. I have measured wire temperatures at over 200°F and they are quite probably considerably higher locally. I'm excited about a solution (which I'll describe at the proper time) which dumps a lot of heat out of the crossover and drivers.

Nicco & jazzman - for the record, there is a deep supply of woofers and tweeters to maintain the CS.5.

Thoft- PM sent

jhouse - There is no gasket of any kind behind the basket rim, and it is not in a rabbet. Mine was stuck hard to the painted baffle - force of habit I suppose. I used a thin bladed artist spatula, a putty knife will do, to work under the edge and pop it out. 

thoft - the heat effects apply to all speakers, somewhat more so to first order due to the drivers operating over broader ranges. Your crossovers are inside the cabinet where ambient temperature gradually rises and the XOs are often behind insulation. There might be trouble since your driver voice coil was toasted, usually by under powered amp driven into clipping.

If there is any permanent damage to your XOs, it would usually be obvious via inspection such as popped caps or charred resistors. If it sounds OK it probably is OK. But since your drivers were toasted, It wouldn't hurt to look around.

Did I miss something? Are there some D28s available somewhere?

The driver goes into the rabbet and the beveled ring fills in the rest.

Nuzzi - I love mine. The seamless integration with the main speakers is practically unbelievable. I agree that you 'should' be able to get them fixed when they break. Do that and tell us all and make lots of friends. I have tried two industry warrantee and repair shops to no avail and now have my SS1 at a local shop which has been quite knowledgeable and successful for other repairs. That ballot is still out, but the first two couldn't crack the code. Jim used a thermistor circuit to compensate for thermal compression from voice coil heat, plus his own circuitry for room boundary compensation. Both are "not normal".

The development documentation, patent applications and schematics are AWOL. It is possible that Jim kept that close to his chest; I know that he did all the repair himself and I can only speculate why. I am trying to find and recover documentation, which would make repair feasible and provide a foundation for working on quieting the background noise.
Anyhow, enjoy your woofers and please share your experience.

Duramax - How would you characterize the sonic differences between the 2.4 and 2.7? Anyone else can also chime in too. Thanks.