CS2 guys - welcome to a remembrance. The CS2 is among the most successful and most formative in Thiel's history. The 3-series launched from near the beginning; the CS3 was 4th generation thinking in 1983. The CS2 was a fresh start in 1985. It was devised as the little sister to its big brother CS3 - smaller, less expensive, less bold for smaller rooms and music, delicate and refined. It was the largest count and longest running speaker in the history of the company. Rojacob's fall at the end of the cycle. Some dealers encouraged us to delay the introduction of the 2.2 because sales were strong for the 2. In fact, the two products over-lapped their production cycle in 1990.
I want to tribute Tim Tipton as part of the CS2s success. Tim had succeeded in his own enterprise and came to us as a seasoned manager - he ran our purchasing department for 20 years until his retirement. Tim brought concepts such as progressive forecasting and commitments. The CS2 concept required parts cost to be 1/3 lower than the CS3, in addition to cabinet materials and labor 40% lower. Let's look at drivers and crossover components. The Dynaudio D28 tweeter was an expensive unit, used in many of the leading brands at that time. The Vifa midrange and Seas woofer were substantially customized and therefore priced at premium. Tim negotiated prices based on our forecast of 10,000 drivers with annual commitments a year ahead of need on prenegotiated monthly releases. In a volatile marketplace filled with small, transient, unstable startups, Tim positioned Thiel as an anchor around which driver suppliers could plan. The importing distributors could bring in thousands of units for us on a predictable schedule. He negotiated every ounce of cost reduction from the situation, and with price-freeze protection 2 years out. Tim's local reputation was that he could squeeze and dime out of a nickel.
The crossovers were expensive - including 6-9s aerospace coil wire which I had sourced from ITT for the 03. Tim applied the same long-range forecasting to that wire for substantial cost reductions. And caps and so forth. He also introduced more sophisticated accountancy, such as the CS3 drivers, caps and so forth continued to bear their previous cost burdens and the negotiated reductions were applied to the CS2 bill of materials instead of averaging the shared parts costs.
In my cabinet planning, Tim served as an intelligent participant. He helped isolate the profound cost savings of concentrating the wave-shaping mechanism into the grille board rather than the 3-D baffle augmented with a complementary grille of the CS3. Remember, this jujitsu machining all preceeded CNC technology and required serious dedicated methods with high-skill workers. The grille-boards became an independent operation, untied from cabinets, wood finish prediction, run sizes and so forth. CS2 cabinets had all flat panels with only the single angled baffle.
Some of you might enjoy a marketplace anecdote. Tony Cordesman was writing for Stereophile at that time and gave the CS2 an astoundingly positive review, taking the Quad ESL-63 as his comparison against which the CS2 stacked up quite respectably. Tony specifically cited the elegant success of the CS2 grille for dispersion control and diffraction mitigation. Stereophile's new publisher Larry Archibald took on the CS2 as his extensive long-term reference and always niggled an upper midrange edge . . . It turned out that Larry "never used grilles" and therefore had negated the carefully engineered tweeter wave guide and rounded edge boundary. He later claimed that Thiel had solved the edginess problem via crossover changes. Tony was an extremely astute listener, migrated to The Absolute Sound, and all these gyrations stay behind the curtain.
Back to Rojacob's CS2s. That historic model doesn't turn up much these days. But considering its inherent strengths I suggest they are well worth reviving. At nearly 30 years old, the electrolytic caps are near expiration. Storage is especially hard on Ecaps and failure of series feeds would endanger the midrange and tweeter, which are out of production. Your coils and wire are state of the art. Your schematic is tweaked and final behond #4900. If you want to delve, I can recommend caps and resistors as well as some cabinet tweaks. The CS2 began life at $1250/ pair in 1985 and were always compared to products costing some multiple. You could make them better than new with very little investment.
