snbeall
Welcome! Good to see you here. There are a couple of PP 1.2 members of the Panel. It is a cool product that can be utilized in several configurations. I look forward in reading more about your room and system.
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!
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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. |
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 Thiel when you stated Long Engineering was that the company of Ed Long who patented the Time Align setup for crossovers? In the early 80’s a friend and I contracted Ed Long to design a 8 in midbass driver and a 4 inch midrange driver that were built by Eminence which is about 30 miles from my home. The 8 inch was in a rather small sealed enclosure and the mid and tweeter were mounted on sculpted panel time offset to the wooden cabinet attached below. The midrange was mounted in a open back damped tube. Both the 8 in and 4 inch were very shallow in cone depth. Ed’s thinking was the deeper the cone the more time the cone was out of time alignment as it traveled. Of course Ed designed the crossover as well. The bass eventually became a early version of the ELF subwoofers who along with Long was patented by Ron Wickersham . Eminence built us 10 inch woofers which we mounted 2 in a each separate but attached cabinet. These also had a time offset. The drivers were crossed over below the system resonance point and we put in use a Mcintosh MQ 104 xover and eq for the woofers extension and control. They were powered by a Tom Holman amp. Incredible soundstage and super fast powerful bass with no boom or overhang. May be the the best integrated bass I have ever heard to this day. Good luck to all following this thread and sharing their experiences and upgrades. Tom |
tomthiel, A life time lover of Thiel Audio, I never managed to own any myself - either due to $, space, or SAF restrictions. Although I had never heard them, the Powerpoints always intrigued me, so when I recently stumbled onto a set of 5 Powerpoint 1.2’s, I grabbed them. I was blown away in a rudimentary 2.1 audition on the floor (hardwood over concrete). In fact, the imaging was so convincing that my SO wandered into the room and asked what I’d done to the floorstanders next to them. “Her voice sounds so natural”. She then noticed the Powerpoints and asked, “And what are those things on the floor?! They look like boobs!” Which, in fact they do. No wonder I’d always been intrigued! In fact, I was so impressed that I’ve been accumulating Powerplanes as well - perhaps to supplement the PPoints in a future multichannel project. I’m even a bit sorry to have missed those recent Viewpoints for the bedroom TV. I was powering the PP1.2’s with a Bluesound Powernode 2i which is what I had on hand. Although the little (60W) hybrid digital amp is quite respectable in it’s own right, I have to wonder if I couldn’t do better. I have tried to follow your PP1.2 saga, but the thread is HUGE and the search function may not have turned up all your posts. I’ve never found what you are using to drive yours. Any recommendations - preferably used/depreciated? And do you cross them to a sub? I’ve accumulated both the 2 and 5 channel dedicated Thiel passive sub crossovers as well. ;-) The trail seems to have grown cold on the external crossover mods - seemingly related to the bankruptcy settlement. Any updates there? Thx in advance. And in retrospect as well. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
@tomt one recent development I am quite excited about is a German laser scanning machine for evaluation of drivers pistonic behavior- excellent Vandersteen video of two drivers side by side test results.... lots of out of phase trash in the pass band on the comparison driver. I mention this because I believe this is a key key way to move the art forward- we need more pistonic AND affordable drivers!!!!! the scan costs $500 |
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. |
@tomic601: "How they measure is hyper important IF the art is to move forward" I agree 100% with this when it comes to any and all speaker designers, manufacturers and researchers. Most of the real progress has come from individuals and/or companies with both the insight and the access to, or creation of, SOTA measurement gear. Uh, Thiel for example :-) My point was that the majority of those who purchase the end-product have little background to make sense of a manufacturer's (usually) minimal published specifications, or interpret the one or two independent lab tests, if they even exist for the speaker under purchase consideration. There's the small minority of us here who do have a clue about the measurements' relevance, but all of us will have to admit they don't substitute for how any speaker sounds in a particular acoustic with all the combinations of upstream hardware. |
As an electrical test engineer and lifelong audio geek, I've found Stereophile's measurements rudimentary. For the most part, the testing strategies, reporting, and the depth of analysis hasn't evolved in decades. And they don't tell us a whole lot; today all equipment should measure great to Stereophile standards, and, as mentioned, the attempts at correlating the minimalist measurements with the reviewer's impressions are weak at best. Looking back at some magazine equipment test reports from the '70s and '80s is instructive. People are right to complain the reviews were 50% or more a thorough reporting on a multitude of valid measurements, and at best a paragraph on the (particularly electronics) subjective sound. BUT the measurements were solid and for the most part far more comprehensive than JA's. The instrumentation and printing of the day didn't allow for as many pictures of graphs, but the authors got the information across, at least to those who could interpret the specs for what they were. A lot of the measurements that had the most relevance are of little use for today's gear: tape decks, tuners, tone controls. But two pieces that were very well-tested that seems entirely lacking today were turntables and phono cartridges, where the measurements generally did do a reasonably good job of reflecting each component's sonics when contextualized with listening comments. Today all vinyl playback gear I've read about is entirely subjective. A frequency response plot of a properly aligned and loaded cartridge is VERY relevant but for one example. Finally, to the points on this forum, even the speaker testing was often more involved. This was before FFT instrumentation and RTA analyzers, but Hirsch-Houck and CBS labs, among others, used the best techniques they had available to get a handle on loudspeaker measurements, and were clear where they encountered measurement limitations that may not correlate to actual listening. They published measured distortion throughout the frequencies at various levels, often toneburst reproduction and interpretations of it, impedance vs frequency, farfield frequency response with pink noise from various (and combined) positions, and more, that for 30-40+ years ago gave a good idea of how a particular speaker might perform. It doesn't seem this has evolved very much at the consumer level in any publication I'm aware of. Though I rarely read much of the audiophile press with any regularity! For me, like the rest of us, -- in this forum -- how my Thiels actually sound with proper setup and upstream hardware is far more important than how they measure. But the engineer in me still wants to connect with my chosen gear from the standpoint of thoughtful, solid, and often clever, engineering I agree with, long-term durability, fad-free design, and as far as I'm able to discern, specs that don't reveal shortcomings or shortcuts in the design or execution of the end product. To quote Michael Fremer, "I'm a Giant Walking Opinion." |
Yes, in the 1990s there were a couple of Thiel reviews wherein JA acknowledged the "suckout" was probably more a result of his techniques than actual performance. From the CS2.3 measurements section:
The 50" mike distance I use is a compromise between the need for correct drive-unit integration and the opposed need for midrange resolution in the resulting graph. But it is possible that the lack of presence-region energy in fig.3 is actually due to the 50" mike distance and is not real, in that it disappears at the farther distances at which a speaker like the Thiel will be listened to. There was at least one other Thiel review wherein he said something similar. But I think he didn't write a word about this in any Thiel review after ca. 2000. I am thankful for how JA built Stereophile up, particularly, becoming the only US audio mag with subjective reviews *and* measurements (even if the measurements have obvious faults, at least they're applied equally to all products). But present day Stereophile is not for me. |
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. |
@tomic601 Did Stereophile review the Kento already? I didn’t renew my subscription last year. Not happy with JA’s promotion, even hype, of MQA. Jim Austin taking the reins was a deal breaker for me. Meanwhile, JA’s protocols really put Thiels and Vandersteens at a disadvantage. Comparing Stereophile’s and Soundstage’s measurements of the CS2.4, for example, it’s almost like they were not measuring the same speaker (Soundstage contracts with NRC which has a real anechoic chamber and they can measure at 2 m). The 2.4 has what appears to be the flattest frequency response in the Soundstage database! |
@solobone22 Hello! Thanks for sharing your experience...especially considering Bel Canto’s amps are definitely on my short list of auditioning. I may have to adjust my thinking as I am primarily looking at D-amplification from an efficiency standpoint but haven’t researched too deeply in how well it would match with the rest of my tube-based gear...especially considering I went with tube line stage & phono preamp to add some “lushness” to the revealing nature of my CS3.5’s. Thanks again & please let me know how those 600M’s go along with your Levinson. Arvin |
@arvincastro regarding Class D amps - I have a pair of the Bel Canto REF600M monos. My initial impression driving either 2.7's or 3.6's wasn't favorable and I believe this was due to a poor match with other associated components. At the time everything that I had was going towards the accurate side of the spectrum and this may have not been a good recipe to insert the Bel Cantos into. I need to try them again with the Thiels using my newest preamp - a Levinson 326s. As a point of partial reference I'm running the 2.7's with Bryston 7BST monos and the 3.6's with a Krell TAS in stereo mode. The Bel Canto amps are currently running B&W CDM1SE's in an office system with excellent results. |
Well, I bought a pair of ViewPoints off ebay for $450. I don't have a real specific use in mind yet. They might be surrounds, might end up used as computer speakers. Maybe I'll take them to work and use them to listen to music at work. I'm frequently the first one in the office and I have an hour or so before anyone else gets in. I'm guessing these are probably as good as the PowerPoints and an off the chart bargain at the price. |
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. |
Several thoughts, will try to parse a bit... reminder I have a pair of 2.3+ Yes, Charlie at Ayre a brilliant designer and EE with ears, to wit his A to D converter ( and musical recordings) and DAC with listen and measure filters ( a fantastic poke in the eye to those obsessed with measuring the wrong things), yes his SS amps some of the best, TomT the old 100 watt amp very affordable used, getting long in tooth for sure but still quite musical |
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. |