Thiel Owners

A personal piece of history: Bose made Thiel cease and desist from using the number 2.2 for our second generation model 2, which we renamed the CS2 2, without the decimal point, garnering more publicity and support than any emerging company could ask for.

TBH I never forgave Bose for that (being the owner of some 2 2’s). Glad it actually worked in your favor, but I could never see how they could claim infringement on a number system. I doubt seriously they could slide today, what with the advent of the internet and software, everything is 2.x and 3.x.

C-Vega “ Strong Like Bull, Smart Like Tractor “

A friend had some C-V’s back in the day. We affectionately called them the Gruntpigs.

Arvin - floor coupling is, in my experience, a worthwhile endeavor. During development of the 03 In the late 70s, we discovered a new problem attributable to phase/time coherence, of a bothersome upper midrange jitteriness. A cure was to couple the speakers to the wood floor via 3 pins.

I’m hoping to get my 2.2’s back to daddy soon, in my new place which I’m frantically readying. In my other setups, I used the cones on pucks when I had suspended hardwood floors, and then the cones directly on carpet so they connected to the sub-floor in an upstairs room. Now, I’ll have them on hardwood over concrete slab, so I figured dig out the pucks again. However I was wondering if anybody has tried anything like the IsoAcoustics Gaia? It seems to me to be the opposite of what you’d want, but an awful lot of people are singing their praises. Thoughts?

rosami
Thanks for the input on that. For the past 17 years mine have been on a second floor dedicated room, but it was built in such a way that the part where the speakers sat had joists running a short direction of only 6’, which definitely played a part in the rooms interaction. The low midrange hump I was getting elsewhere was gone.

Now, I’ll have them on slab floors (hardwood on slab) and have zero idea how they’ll sound - but assume they’ll be as fast as I barely remember in the shop 35 years ago. I definitely want to try something like the iso-acoustics out once I live with them for a few weeks and get the room more or less tuned.


It’s driving me nuts that they’re literally 5 blocks away from me right now, and with our shelter-in-place I can’t get the movers over there. I’d dearly love some tunes in this big empty house right now! Ugh. I’ve got an old Adcom 555 pre/amp in the garage, I might try doing something as an interim/streaming setup and some inexpensive bookshelves. I’m about Netflixed out!I’ll keep you posted.

Like sdl4, my search for speakers ended in the early 90's with a pair of 2.2's. 2 years was a long time for me to own any piece of audio gear. I had some Maggies at the time, and had 2 Adcom 555's acting as monoblocks. But Still wasn't feeling it. I spent hours and hours auditioning against the likes of Vandersteen, which just weren't doing it for me. There was something so right to my ear with the Thiels across the board. Perhaps the most impressive thing was their ability to throw a sound stage like few floor-standing speakers I've heard. Not just left and right, but even from behind.

Since then, I've upgraded everything at least once but usually 3 times, and most specifically a dedicated listening room with dedicated power (maybe the biggest upgrade of all). But no other speaker tempted me enough at the end of the day, even for a lot more money.

Sadly, a variety of things got me out of music for several years. A divorce has kept my system/software away from me for 4 years, but I'm about to get it back! The Thiels are way too large for my townhouse, I'm looking at downsizing. They'll go back in their boxes for the first time in almost 30 years, but they're keepers. I'm not here forever. I'll probably see if the KEF R series can come close to the magic that is Thiel, but I'm not counting on it.

I had settled on MIT back in the 90's when I was originally pushing my 2.2's with Adcom. Can't remember which/what, I did upgrade to a better MIT I was so impressed and had big gray boxes everywhere. I'd even tried out Cardas and Audioquest from friends and was pretty meh.


However, when I got my BAT amp & pre, I wanted to get some balanced interconnect cable to take advantage of that. At the time I got a screaming deal on PS Audio Xstream everything as they were discontinuing everything but the power cable. So I figured I'd just buy everything I could lay my hands on and replaced all my cable with PS. The speaker cable is short of comic though, truly garden hose stuff.


After it was broken in, I couldn't go back to the MIT. In fact, the cable seemed to be the final missing link. I'd seen measurements indicating that the VK-3iX measured much better using the balanced connects, that might have had something to do with it. But when I would swap out just speaker cable, there was still a notable difference. In the end, I really enjoy the PS and hope I can figure out a way to continue using the speaker cable. But the speaker cable was really short so that's going to be iffy. I do still have a box full o' MIT somewhere!