Thiel Owners

trickeydude

See the link below for Tom’s reference on the Stereophile review.

The 3.6 can perform well with a good lower powered amp but a big power amp will really open the speakers up. There are some good prices on used equipment but beware as anything substandard from the source onward toward the speakers. The 3.6 will expose any shortcomings in a system. I’ve also found poorly recorded or engineered music shows it’s lack of quality.

Cabling can be an issue for some including myself. For power, interconnects, and speaker wire, silver conductor based cables can be very bright on the highs. Copper cabling helps with this and in my case using digital copper interconnects (110 Ohm resistance) softened the hard edges.

I feel these are an excellent Jazz and Classical speaker that is good with rock to an extent. They will play loud yes but that isn’t this speakers forte.

I have both my systems listed on the virtual page, the Anthem amp powered the 3.6s fine, but the McIntosh MC462 brought them to life.

Good luck and enjoy your music!

ydjames - the breakup you describe can be caused by various things. Among them could be lose voice coil turns or other non-design-related phenomena. Let’s rejoice that the new drivers fixed the problem.

Last week I had a ’sound’ in a CS1.6 woofer similar to what you describe . I went looking for ’dirt’ in the voice coil gap, but instead found a steel washer resting on the ’top plate’. That little washer had fallen out of the driver mounting boss and stuck to the driver. It saturated and caused distortion in the magnetic flux field. In my case the ’fix’ was easy. Remove the washer and the distortion is gone.

Follow-on is that I am replacing the steel threaded inserts in the driver basket and the steel mounting bolts with brass, and the washers with fiber. I expect to hear the cleanup of a far lower level of that same distortion. That hardware is only an inch or so distant from where that single washer caused audible distortion. Speakers can have lots of low-level anomalies and sub-optimal implementations. Some get identified and fixed or improved during development, some are worked out during future product iterations. Some still remain to be addressed.

@duegi 

That's an amazing setup you have! Love the Mac pairing! I would love to go in a McIntosh direction with my Thiels. Perhaps I could find older Mac gear that would work for me and be somewhat reasonable price wise. Any older - yet powerful enough - suggestions, anyone? I’m wondering if a MC-252 might be good.

Down the rabbit hole I go…

Always wanted to try a pair of Thiel 3.7, not sure if the Luxman 590 would be a good match. Maybe the Yamaha MX-1000 would sound better. I'm using B&W 803 and feel maybe a change is needed.

Do you mean the ring on the outside of the driver that holds it on to the speaker?

@prof Bingo! The rings outside the driver facing towards us.

Always wanted to try a pair of Thiel 3.7, not sure if the Luxman 590 would be a good match.

@webking185 I think it will be fine. However, I will look at other pairings that are rated 2 ohms stable as the 3.7 are quite a difficult load.