Excellent Cabling options discussion -Guys.
Happy Listening!
Happy Listening!
Thiel Owners
Guys-
I just scored a sweet pair of CS 2.4SE loudspeakers. Anyone else currently or previously owned this model?
Owners of the CS 2.4 or CS 2.7 are free to chime in as well. Thiel are excellent w/ both tubed or solid-state gear!
Keep me posted & Happy Listening!
I just scored a sweet pair of CS 2.4SE loudspeakers. Anyone else currently or previously owned this model?
Owners of the CS 2.4 or CS 2.7 are free to chime in as well. Thiel are excellent w/ both tubed or solid-state gear!
Keep me posted & Happy Listening!
13,745 responses Add your response
Thiel Audio used to diplomatically recommend a few cable manufacturers. Amongst them were the OCOS. I’m curious what Thiel users experience with them might be? I believe @pops has tried them. In the past, he like myself have found the Goertz Alpha-Core and Straightwire Maestros to be amongst the best tried. I would be especially interested in comparisons of those three, as well as others to those. |
Just received a pair of powerplane 1.0s that I bought on eBay that I’m planning on using for my rears so I disconnected my cs7s (as I don’t have a 3 channel amp yet for my center and rears) and tried them out on the floor I’m was amazed as how good they sound!! I Listened to them for about 10 mins they really filled the room disconnected them and hooked up my 7s I could really tell that my Bryston 4nrb does not have enough oomph for the 7s! Oh how I wish audio consultants was still around! Do any of the Chicago area guys know if Scott or any of the other salesmen wound up at different hifi shops in the area? David |
As for bi-wiring, I know there are different opinions on the topic. For me here the order in term of improvement: 1. Single run but larger gauge wire 2. Smaller gauge wire but bi-wire 3. By amp For me, going from 1 to 3, the most difference was in the soundstage focus, in which the images are easier to see. There are those who think the improvement of bi-wire comes mainly from the overall larger combined gauge, but personally I see the advantage comes from the bi-wiring itself. |
beetle , Tom I have my wires taped to the sides of Cardas speaker wire blocks , which are 2" wide and then crossing in-between each spacing with them being seperated about 1/2" apart at the crossing . I did this so they aren't parallel possiblity reducing the possibilty of becoming a radio antenna . unsound I read the posts from your link , very interesting , but then again the whole issue of cable designs are very complex with no rights or wrongs , just differences with the end result and our own listening preferences and of course how deep are our pockets . The issue of frequency range and hearing is hard to explain in the audio world of listening , how much do the frequency ranges that we can't hear ( for me it's over 9,000hz and under 50hz ) affect the qualities of space, dimension , width , height , 3D imagery that we listen for but tecnically can not measure ? My reason to make my own cables was to try a theory about the Cardas design ( and because I couldn't afford to move up ) , which sounds better ? 2 wires of 11.5awg together equaling 8.5awg ( Neutral Reference ) or 1 wire of 9.5awg with the outer layer of wires being 1.6 times thicker ( Cardas golden Ration ) than the layer beneath it. I feel ( hear ) the home made cables sounded better ! Raising new questions , was it the increased size of the outer wire in the design ( since it is one awg smaller than before ) or was it because of seperating the positive/negative current flow ? or a combination of both? |
@tomthiel I widened the gap to more like 6” until close to the amp. I will listen critically again before switching back to the “standard” configuration. @andy2 The SE version has an oversized backplate, so I didn’t have to drill the veneer and MDF. But I probably would have if I had the regular 2.4. Then again, much of what I did was probably not for the faint of heart. There was a time or two when I worried I was in over my head. All smiles now! In most ways, my modded 2.4s sound as or nearly as good as the be$t I’ve heard. @jafant I do have a few of the myrtle blocks but most of my blocks are random pieces. Charles Hansen used to advise people who balked at the myrtle price to pick up a Jenga set at a garage sale. Pretty much all of my gear is on some kind of block, even my speakers which is supposed to be a no-no. But that’s a compromise to protect the hand woven rug I inherited from my parents. |
This seemed germane to recent discussion here: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/speaker-cable-geometry-question |
Unsound - yep. The ’why not’ gets slimmer once the ’single’ barrier has been broken. And your suggestion puts the user in the driver’s seat. If we’re thinking a la carte, then the extra cost of a good pair of posts becomes user selected. I am reminded of the CS3, which split the tweeter from the other two combined drivers. That decision was partly due to the equalizer boosted bass with contributions from both the woofer and midrange drivers. But there was also input from Nelson Pass for the advantages of a very sweet class A tweeter amp. Jim prototyped such an amp with gain control to match any full range amp. Separate amps would allow low-level crossovers, before power amp stage where ultra-quality components would cost far less. Plus each cable set would be free from intermodulation from the other bands. No end to the possibilities. Your idea brings to mind something we wrestled with at that time, an 'ultra' line with even more lovely cabinets, special veneers, hand scraped and rubbed finishes and whatever level of exquisite sound quality that might be imagined. The idea didn’t go very far for lots of reasons, but in the early 80s Thiel had very strong and enthusiastic support from reviewers, the editorial press, dealers and consumers. I suspect a market was there, and Thiel could have addressed it. One very tricky part would be how to keep the ’normal’ line from seeming like a poor cousin to the ultra line. At that time Thiel was being courted by Mark Levinson and other expensive brands to develop and build such speakers under their brands. Thiel didn’t have the scope or desire for such undertakings. During my 20 years, and probably onward, Thiel grew at a maximum pace. We couldn’t have grown more if we had wanted to, which we really didn’t. We wanted to do a good job supplying our niche, and affordability was central to that self-image. |
Beetle - crossing at the amp has fewer consequences than parallel. More distance is better, but not by a lot due to inverse square law of distance. Andy - I have previously addressed the single input thinggy. Thiel wanted to side-step the pitfalls involved, both in unmatched cables and the illusion that the added cable expense was needed for designed performance. I am adding a second input pair with good copper shorting plates. |
The B speaker has the same cables, but one cable is ++ and the other is --. Those cables are separated by more than 12" in configuration B, and they are taped side-by side in configuration C.My configuration is not so defined. The ++ and - - (2.5 m lengths) are speaker width apart as they leave the 2.4 binding posts, close to about 2” apart for maybe 60% of their length, then touch and cross each other about a foot out from the amp binding posts. I could increase that 2” gap but would have to get creative to avoid the constriction near the amp. Listened more tonight and played some of my reference tracks. Yeah, they sound better than I remember. Open, clear, dimensional, sure, but the character that grabs me is the ultra-relaxed presentation. Unstrained is another word I think captures the sound. Just great sound! But I’m not ready to declare this configuration as better. I had my DAC upgraded in December and there are reports that this version needs many hundreds of hours to fully break in. So, it’s possible I haven’t played these reference tracks since my DAC fully settled in. I’ll probably switch back to standard configuration by the end of the weekend and listen again a few days later. After that, I’ll open the cabinets and untwist all the hookup wire. OK, probably not that. |
jafant, I've been pseudo-quarantined since last June, only foraying out to go for medical appointments. With only one good eye, there's no depth perception, and a serious fall last year destroyed the vestibular balance. No depth perception plus no balance equals an accident waiting to happen. I get groceries delivered to the home, and my Health Care woman stores them away and helps me do the cooking. My 27" iMac is my window on the world. But thankfully, it could have been a heck of a lot worse. |
Rob - I am a sucker for tracking down stuff I don't understand. I think I will try taping A and A to see what happens. My interest stems from the tendency to replace a wire with a better wire and like it better. Often throwing money at a problem makes it better, even if just in our own minds. I do know that Jim took internal wiring very seriously and tweaked it for years. I don't want to blunder into undoing any of his work by substituting a different solution. On the other side of that coin, I think it highly likely that Beetle, you and others have bettered the outcome. I must quantify such betterments, assess potential pitfalls and decide how to proceed. The puzzle is eternal. |
@tomthiel Sir , you are going way beyond anything I would have imagined , I never expected to have created this much curiosity , let alone you taking time to actually set up tests that can be measured . Straight wire's original configuration balances the yin and yan ( just as every manufacture tries to with their different designs ) within one cable as you measured in configuration A and when they are used in your C configuration maybe that balance is lost ? Maybe a similar measurement might happen if you taped the 2 cables together in configuration A ? While I'm retired from over 30 years in repairing medical equipment where a resistor is just a resistor and a capacitor is just a capacitor this " Audiophile " world has a lot of VooDoo magic , I'm having more fun than I imagined or can measure , ha ha . |
Beetle - No, No I didn’t mean it!JA - Ray is a good idea.All - I continued my comparisons re cabling and noticed a deep bass rumble / congestion with the C arrangement: ++ and --, taped together for close parallel run. Rather than side by side, I put each speaker individually against the corner fill and compared measurements. C had a 10dB rise below 30Hz to the cut-off at 10Hz compared to B, which continued its normal bass rolloff. I confirmed with listening in that corner position. Now, a bass reflex cabinet is rolling off at 24db/octave. There must be powerful resonant mojo in that cable configuration to produce that much deep bass. Anyhow, the B - separated runs - sounds cleaner and more articulate.I’ll repeat this morning and scratch my head. |
@vair68robertt I'm still waiting to hear from Rob G on why my or all 2.7s have this wiring instead of the straight wire that was standard in all other Thiels Earlier, in a discussion about 2.7s in another web page, Jim Thiel was reported to have said that when the 2.7s were designed, he used information he'd gained from the 3.7s. |
If we had the luxury of the Great Symposium where we could hash these issues out with George Cardas, Bill Low Audiouest, Steve Straightwire and various astrophysicists of our choice, we could learn a lot. But in real life, we must make whatever progress we can make, learning from experience and limited knowledge and paying attention to lots of leads. Here's a memory of such a lead. The CS5 had a huge crossover that included 2 huge bucket brigade delays in addition to 4 crossovers for the 5 drivers, which had huge magnets. Talk about a pot of soup. We used our usual solid 18 gauge tight twist in teflon. Jim always included the speaker wire runs in his calculations and tests. In other words, those wire runs add resistance, inductance and capacitance to the crossover circuits, and he included that in his design / execution work. OK. In final (4 months long!) listening tests, those crossovers came in and out lots of times. The workhorse pair used straight single wires from the XO terminals to a terminal block mounted on the side of the cabinet. Eventually the twisted driver runs were hooked directly to the XO, and there was "a sound" that couldn't be accounted for in electrical terms nor in concept engineering terms. We chose the final 9" to 12", depending on which driver, to be left untwisted. Something about how the wire-fields were interacting with the "pot of soup" made that configuration sound better. It is possible that Jim gained additional knowledge as time went on, but at that time none of us nor anything we could learn could explain much of anything about the heard phenomenon. We may be in a similar situation with these cable runs. I ran tests on A, B and C as described above. All the tests in my kit - to see if there were changes introduced by the different configurations. I can't detect any. So far I have listened to Morrow SP-4 and Straightwire Octave II. Both exhibit similar differences. Both are sophisticated cables. I have not yet tried my ProCo (Beldenesque) HiPure 4-conductor "normal" stranded cables. What I learned from the SW, is that the 3 configurations measure as "identical". There are no measured differences that I can identify to account for the heard differences. So, whoever goes comparing, you can dismiss the potential cause of measurable frequency response changes, or impulse or phase changes. It's something else. As an end user, Rob can choose whichever he likes better. Fair enough. As a designer, I must pursue understanding that might be applied in the internal wiring as well as fodder for this user mill's advancement. I'll be calling Steven Hill and George Cardas to pick some brains. I'll be very interested in what Beetle reports. Any other input is also much appreciated. |
It might add value to describe my approach to the cable differences. First, a disclaimer. I do not claim to know how the variables of cable interact with each other. I am apprised of the textbook basics of capacitance blocking low frequencies, inductance rolling of highs, etc. And I know that dielectric absorption matters and a few conversational recommendations. And I also know that those things don't explain for me, and it seems for many very expert engineers, what we hear. Today is not about what I think I might be hearing. It's about my setup, which might provide food for thought or questions, especially from more knowledgeable folks. Here goes. One corner of my studio has a corner baffle with floor-level bass vent into other space. This corner measures well. My amps are overhead with multiple jacks and knife switches for setting up quick-change tests. My chair is about 6' from the V point of the L-shaped room, so there is little reflection from behind. The mic is right in front of me, so it hears about what I hear. For this test, two CS2.2 are side-by side, one meter from the diagonal baffle behind them. My chair is 2.5M (100") back and the mic is 2M - I get usable measurements and hearing in this setup. In this case I have wired speaker A with 2 runs of Straightwire Octave II in standard configuration: + and - in each cable. So there are 4 wires running in 2 cables, each containing a + and a -. The B speaker has the same cables, but one cable is ++ and the other is --. Those cables are separated by more than 12" in configuration B, and they are taped side-by side in configuration C. Today I am listening to Rory Block's "I'm Every Woman" which has enough of everything I need. I also run FuzzMeasure through the system to document A, B and C. More coming after lunch. |
@vari66robert, It seems as though many manufacturers of speaker cables have taken to additional effort to bring conductors as close as possible, going beyond merely efficiency of packaging. Brands like Vandersteen suggest separate bi-wire runs of speaker cable, not that much different than separate conductors for single terminal runs. |
@unsound Think of consumers having 2 cables going to thier speakers , imagine manufactures trying to sell you 2 cables per speaker , let alone the increase in cost . My freind came over with Shunyata Balck Momba speaker cables , 2 per speaker and only 16awg , they had a very thick outer shield making them almost imposible to bend , BUT what a sound improvement . Was it the shielding or the separation ? I couldn't afford to upgrade and buying another set of the same cables was still more expensive than making my own cables . So using a single run of Cardas 9.5 chassis wire for each polarity was the an affordable option . I heard an improvement and passed it on as something for others to try. As for shielding ? When I opened my speakers and found the wiring inside to be side by side like lamp cord I seperated them and heard an improvement. I'm still waiting to hear from Rob G on why my or all 2.7s have this wiring instead of the straight wire that was standard in all other Thiels . |
I haven't made such an experiment of comparing separated cables compared to those of close proximity. It's interesting that so many manufacturer's use close proximity for their speaker cables, whether they use twisted, braided, co-axially, compressed or layered approaches as in Jim Thiel's later preferred Goertz Alpha-Cores; that probably have the maximum close proximity possible. |
But the more I think about it listening in mono might have limitedAdding the Cardas hookup wire and binding posts was my last change. As with my other mods, I did one channel and let it burn in ~200 hours then compared in mono using the same 15 or so reference tracks. I sent my listening notes to Tom and proceeded to perform the Cardas upgrade on the other channel. When I listened in stereo, a *big* smile formed organically on my face. |
@beetlemania @tomthiel I was thinking of a way to test the different connections at the same time, but is sounds like you used a simular method when building your crossovers . But the more I think about it listening in mono might have limited value since much of difference or improvement is in the soundstageing, dimensionality and clarity . Tom , I apologize I misunderstood , You and beetle are in a unique situation having 2 sets of the same cable , bi-wired speakers or not the separation of the pos/neg in the same cable I believe is an improvement in sound quality . Rob |
