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!
KEF is highly regarded and Andrew Jones is a hall of fame level designer but I would stay with the Thiel. You *know* it’s beyond mid-level good, matches your stuff, and is made in US.
it looks/sounds like my MCS1 has a blown coaxial driver. Rob can rebuild it for the price of an entry to mid level center speaker from Kef or Elac. So my dilemma is that do I have Rob do the rebuild or it's time to move on? I am using CS3.7 for my L and R and all Powerplane 1.2 for all surround channels. what would be a good MCS1 replacement with CS3.7?
Something fishy with these numbers. My Thiel 3.7s are serial 1041, 1042. This is indicated on the shipping carton. However, I talked with Rob yesterday about the issue of different crossovers being used with this model. He told me that the 3.7 run had an earlier crossover version, and a later one, for a total of two. He thought that given my serial numbers my speakers would have the earlier version (which he prefers!). He also emailed schematics of both crossover types to me.
Thielrules - I was told by New Thiel CEO Tom Malatesta that fewer than 1000 CS3.7s were built. So there's something wrong with your numbers.
Fitter - your situation is one we hope to address with the hotrod kits, to provide a significant upgrade path for the music lover who wants better, but doesn't necessarily need bigger or more.
I have owned my 3.6s for almost 27 yrs I paid $3900 for them the build quality is second to none imho I use a Bryston amp which I feel is good not great my speakers still sound fantastic!! One day I hoping to get a pair of cs5is or 7.2s (still hesitant because I love my 3.6s) which I know will require a high end amp when people listen to my stereo who aren’t into hifi they ask what are those sounds ie a guitar string vibrating or a vocalist taking a breath other sounds people on this forum clearly are aware of because they have never heard anything so clear and detailed !!! Call me ignorant but I have no desire to hear / own any other speakers ! I feel they are so good they exploit everything in front of them ! What’s the saying Tom Thiel? FOR THE LOVE OF MUSIC!!
last_lemming There are a few Parasound/Thiel owners over on the other Audio forums. This combo has proven to become a sonic match. I must say that you one of the very few to incorporate B.A.T. into the mix. Very interesting combo indeed.
last_lemmingGood to see you again. Thank You for the update. My understanding about owning B.A.T. gear is to obtain that Six-Pack Modification. You own a very nice system. How do you like the Parasound/B.A.T. combo? Happy Listening
!
The Parasound is better than ever now, but I think the reason has to do with the output/input matching of impedance of the preamp and amp. I think the Six-Pak helped that relationship somehow.
I thought when I paired the BAT with the Parasound amp I was good, the stats as I understand them are:
The output impedance of the BAT is 1k ohm (the manual says the amp must have a min. of 10k ohm input.
The Input for balanced connection on the Parasound is 66k ohm
Do you really want to hear the crap from these dealers?
I wonder how much of this is a genuine expression versus sales pitch designed to sow seeds of audiophile doubt in hopes of getting you to buy new speakers. High-end audio is hurting. These brick and mortar stores are disappearing; manufacturers are struggling, too (compare numbers of ads in Stereophile now versus 15 years ago). The middle class is crushed, reducing the pool of potential buyers.
What do your ears tell you about your 3.6s?
I have no interest in active speakers. I’m confident my amp is far more capable than that in any active speaker. There have been *some* improvements in speakers over the past 10-20 years, namely carbon and beryllium diaphragms. But Thiel drivers are excellent even now, all the more so considering the price of speakers with exotic diaphragm material. My CS2.4s are probably my last speaker, almost certainly if my XO rebuild is successful.
When a coherence claim is made I suggest getting the panel of test plots. Generally there will be some aspect that is compromised such as B&Ws progressive 180° phase shifts handed off through the range (second order slopes.) The smooth transition is called "coherent", etc., so you have to sort it out. Fourth order L-W slopes can be time corrected, but all the drivers end up with latency relative to the input, which causes its own form of digital ringing.
There are many successful design topologies. Phase-time coherence is something that we at Thiel along with Richard Vandersteen (independently) and a few others for short times, decided to pursue. It's a very difficult pursuit, and much ink has been spilled "proving" that it doesn't matter. If the others admitted it mattered, they would have to apologize for their product. But to those who 'get it', it does matter. I couldn't go back, no matter how sweet or luscious some $6 figure speaker sounds.
Rosami - your dealer feedback is helpful. I am working on understanding the marketplace having been away for 20+ years.
I know you know, but I'll say: There is no faking, but there is elucidation. There is lots of residue on a recording that the producer doesn't hear. Thiel illuminates, which is both blessing and bane.
The complex crossover is a burden. Indeed, all those parts introduce a veil and must be very high quality to produce the result. Thus our current work.
Thiel drivers have always been very expensive. I vividly remember when the big W hit the scene and their woofer was half the cost of one we had rejected for our smallest 6.5" two way. Their product retailed for 10X as much. We outgrew commercial drivers because the best Danish custom houses were unwilling to do the extra work and precision for our demands.
The test for time coherence is a square wave or impulse over the entire range. If the wave-form keeps its integrity, then the job is being done. The same information is in impedance or phase plots, but you have to know more to read those.
Active speakers have a lot going for them. DSP wears multiple hats. It is inexpensive and versatile. But great digital conversion is rare. Most DSP results in some form of digititis, and actually can't solve the fundamental filter issues without compromises.
All the way back to the beginning - our greatest work before launching the Model O1, was Jim's development of an internally amplified, actively controlled speaker. That prototype was crude, and who knows, may have been surreptitiously rescued from the New Thiel Dumpster Frenzie. Given larger company scope and budgets, active speakers is where Thiel wanted to go.
Jon - I know of no active / DSP, etc. speaker that is minimum phase / time aligned. The big problem is drivers that can handle the band-width. Jim Thiel spent a lifetime incrementally developing such drivers. And remember, the scientific community broadly agrees that coherence is irrelevant because the human ear-brain is good enough at reconstituting the compromised timing information. Steep slopes sequester the scramble to narrow bands which therefore have less information and can be more readily ignored. The present darling is 4th order Linkwitz-Riley filters because the undisciplined mind can pretend that 360° phase shift, (one full cycle of phase delay) is somehow equal to 0°, unless you think about it. Our approach is a purist one: faithfully capture all aspects of all the forms of information presented at the input terminals.
Anyhow, the matter of authentic signal reproduction is a matter of extreme esoterica. Most people aren't wired to notice or care.
Also besides the complex architecture of DSP, you can’t do the following: 1. Use vinyl as your source 2. Use your favorite tube amplifier 3. Use your favorite DAC as your source 4. If you have a set of favorite speakers cable such as Crystal Cable Absolute Dream, you can’t use it either because the DSP setup has its own dedicate built-in cables to the drivers. So if the DSP design uses low end cable, you’re more or less stuck with it.
andy2 Excellent points on DSP and its complex architecture. I can remember the Meridian system being quite expensive, involved and several pieces of gear to perform dedicated functions. Happy Listening!
Does anyone know of an active, dsp, phase correct/coherent speaker?
I have seen one claim from the DIY community that was able to produce a perfect step response but I can't personally vouch for it. He claims that he uses DSP to delay the tweeter so that it matches with the mid range (the equivalent of tilting the cabinet as in Thiel design), but other than that, I don't know anything else.
I think using active DSP has its own drawback. It's not all that it claims to be. In someway, it's even more complicated than passive cross over. For example, for a three way, you need six different amplifiers and six different DAC's. I mean one amplifier is expensive enough. In order to have six, you have to use inexpensive amplifier such as digital amplifier, so the quality of the sound is heavily compromised. Likewise, with six DAC, you have to compromise as well. So everything considered, using active DSP is a compromise approach.
It's amazing the amount of b.s. you encounter from high end salesmen (well...they *are* salesmen). Guys who work decades in a high end store can just ossify in their own ignorance and it's a shame how many people they may miseducate.
Fortunately I've always been able to find a very few salesmen who are low-key, no b.s., no sales pressure and know when to just leave someone alone to listen to a system they are auditioning. Those are the shops I go back to and often purchase equipment.
jon_5912 In all of my years in this hobby, I can only think of Meridian. At one time these guys were into Active, DSP, speakers. Not sure if their technology pushed time/phase coherence? Happy Listening!
last_lemmingGood to see you again. Thank You for the update. My understanding about owning B.A.T. gear is to obtain that Six-Pack Modification. You own a very nice system. How do you like the Parasound/B.A.T. combo? Happy Listening!
jonandfamily Thanks for the kind words about my system in virtual systems! My serial numbers are 5457/58 - Amberwood - still look immaculate but need some TLC (tweeters and maybe mids need rebuild). Next step is with CSS.
Does anyone know of an active, dsp, phase correct/coherent speaker? I haven't heard of one. From what I've seen the dsp speakers use extremely steep slopes to get near perfect frequency response and low distortion. People still don't like them. I watched the NHT Xd system come to market and fail miserably 10+ years ago. I asked a sales guy about a set I saw pushed aside in a store after the hype had died down and he just said they weren't good for the money. Maybe the complex Thiel crossover is what we should be replicating digitally. It might still take a ton of work to get right but once optimized wouldn't have the low impedance and high parts cost problems.
tomthiel Do you really want to hear the crap from these dealers? It'll be painful listing their comments, but I'll try to be accurate. Dealer 1) Imaging and focus are not real, but created. Thiel speakers basically do sound effects and sound big and flashy but are not accurate. That dealer also criticized me for mentioning imaging and focus, stating they're not real speaker attributes but rather sound effects created by Thiel speakers. This dealer stresses that imaging doesn't occur in concerts or real music. He also actually said that I was partially responsible for the failure of Naim's Ovator speakers because imaging wasn't a priority for them but "people like you" value those kinds fake qualities in a speaker. When I asked him what speakers he liked, he stated that he likes to listen in mono, prefers speakers that do not image and that are "in-you-face" since he likes to listen really loud. (not much comment necessary.) Dealer 2) Thiel speakers are very poorly designed, especially the newer models with the coax mid/tweeter which were a "disaster." The old ones were a little better. Thiels use cheap drivers made overseas, are not accurate and are not time coherent - that's all just marketing. Their sound is a mess because Jim Thiel used very complex crossovers which had no way of being phase correct and they were not really first-order crossovers anyway. Dealer 3) Thiel's crossovers have to be extremely complex to compensate for the poor drivers. If a speaker is so hard to drive correctly and so amp dependent, then it is a very poor design. Why would you design a speaker to go down under 2 ohms and drive amps into distortion? You're crazy wasting your money by having them repaired; there have been so many improvements in drivers and crossovers in 21 years that its time to get rid of them. (None of those dealers were talking active or DSP.) Interestingly I spoke to a couple previous Thiel dealers who praised the speakers and stated their regret regarding what happened to the company. I also found them to be superior dealers overall. (One of those did talk active and DSP and his setups did sound excellent IMO.) All of the negative dealers made their comments after I'd stated to them that I've owned various Thiel speakers for the last 32 years. I guess they feel it's OK to spread this nonsense. High-end audio is a ruthless business!
Hey guys. Have had my CS 2.4’s for many years now and have always felt they needed a bit more midbass. Well, I sent my BAT VK-3ix Preamp out for the Six-Pak modification from the factory.
Just hooked it up, and WOW it’s like a new set of speakers. Midrange is “here” and midbass is clean and correct. Lower bass is more pronounced. Dynamics are way better too. In fact this is the best thing I’ve done to get these speakers sounding the way I wanted. I almost don’t need the REL subwoofer!
rosami, I'll bet your serial numbers are close to my CS3.6s- 4789, 4790. Your setup on virtual systems looks terrific. I'm with you....trust your ears and not the claims! I, also visit dealers when I travel and have not found any speakers I prefer. I'm also curious at what dealers you talked to are claiming. Jon
rosami Thank You for chiming in. Agreed, trust your ears. As some of you guys are discovering, newer loudspeakers, are not always better. Happy Listening!
I've been listening to speakers recently to compare to my 21 year old CS3.6s -- it's a journey that I'll continue for awhile. Visiting a number of dealers, I've been amazed at all the Thiel bashing by some of these dealers - crazy claims - outright lies - claims that technology has come so far and that my speakers are obsolete - even personal criticism that I consider imaging and focus important. It's easy to see why high-end audio gets such a bad rap! Trust your ears and if you find a good dealer, support him!
Excellent points Andy and Tom.I can remember reading about the WANG600. Whatever happened to that computer maker? IBM was quite a force until Apple and Microsoft came onto the scene. What a time capsule...? Happy Listening!
All the technical discussions not withstanding, it's all about the music albeit first order, higher order, ... as long as you enjoy the music, it's all that matters.
Andy - Computers are a big part of the mix, and those tools are now easily accessible. To clarify: in Thiel's very beginning, computers were pretty limited. We used them from the beginning via Fred Collopy, another original collaborator who went on for his PhD in Decision Science - managing unimaginably large decisions with serious aid from computer modeling. We did Fourier Transforms (FFT) on impulse samples before 1980 and the number crunching took all night - literally we read the results the next morning. We used computers (Wang 600) before IBM or APPLE were in the personal computer business. So, we were ahead of winging it in the dark ages.
Your list addresses a few of the challenges. There are many more. Visionary unified engineering is rare and pure; I see Jim's work as that - one mind accumulating the questions and answers over tens of thousands of listening hours and iterations. That's a powerful thing.
One example of the contrary is the development of the CS2.7 by Warkwyn, among the best development engineering firms in the world with access to the Canadian National Resources Lab. It took them years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop the crossover for the 2.7 with the constant guidance and help of the team at Thiel. They have computers and resources to make your head spin. The tools are only part of the picture.
So I did my comparison today, the bryston 3bst and 7bst in parallel and serial on my Thiel 3.7. As both amps are off the same generation, they sound sonically identically. I used some jazz music, with organ and sax (domnerus, antiphone blues) and Brubeck, take five. First observation: the spl of the 3bst and 7bst in parallel were the same so comparing both in mono was very easy. Second observation: at 80 dB, what I consider at live loudness, both Amps were easily able to reproduce the music as I was seated 12 feet away. The only difference I could consistently detect was in the low bass where the 7bst was fuller. Any differences in the upper range, was undetectable by me, no signs of any distortion. 3. But then I played some female vocals, brendi carlille, and there it was, her voice was deeper on the 7bst and sharper on the 3bst. Enough of a difference to keep the 7bst.
Thanks to Tom for recapturing all the works went into the measurement phase. That seems like a lot of works. I supposed that was before the proliferation of personal computers?
I think today speaker designers probably have a lot easier time with speaker design with the advance of software and inexpensive access to computation. Some of the software are actually free and can be downloaded into your personal computers. I personally only spent about $270.00 and able to purchased a set of hardware that can perform all the measurements needed to speaker design. All the softwares that I am using are completely free and available on the internet. The rest is up to my own imagination.
As for measurement distant, I think the problem with making measuring at 8ft distant is that by the time the sound arrives at the microphone, you have a lot of sound reflection from the floor, the side walls of the measurement room. You could put a time bracket so you can only capture the sound at a very narrow time window before the reflections but that would compromise the low frequency portion. The longer the measurement distant, the narrower the time window, and hence the lower frequency response compromise. You could correct for that by measuring at closer distant such as 1 meter which is industrial standard. The problem is with first order speakers, at that distant, the mid and tweeter may not fully integrated so that is another challenge. Or you could build a large chamber so the floor and side walls distant is a lot longer than 8ft. Another problem is at low frequency, the wavelength is so long that you need a very large chamber so that you can accurately capture the one wavelength of low bass frequency before reflection. Tom mentioned that Thiel was trying to measure the speakers outdoor with the speakers mounted on a tree to eliminate reflection from the ground so I guess it had to be a pretty high tree :-). Eventually it may not be practical to build such a large chamber so there are a few methods of trying to merge the high frequency and low frequency response. There are software that could do this but they seem to have their own limitation.
But I think you could make it as complicated as you want, or you could simplify as much as you could to get a finish product.
Prof - I began my re-acquaintance with Thiel Audio when Jim died in 2009 which increased when the company sold in 2013 and more so when New Thiel ceased operations earlier this year. I agree with your assessment of appreciation. However, in my fairly extensive reading I am struck by how little the actual scope and accomplishment of the work is known.
Jim was very self-effacing and introverted and did not effuse, as I have been doing in this thread. And the company didn't spend effort on promotion or advertising and didn't develop liaisons which might have focused the understanding and value of the work more than the somewhat superficial understanding generated by reviews.
Flashing forward a few decades, I believe that phase-time will be revered in speakers much like it is today through the audio production chain from capture, right up to the speaker where it is commonly accepted that the ear-brain can descramble the signal well enough. Life is short and we leave very little mark. But what a trip!
That was an absolutely fascinating read, Tom. Thank you!
I'd followed Thiel for years, and especially when I was on the hunt for 3.7s in 2015 and afterward, I was fascinated with the story of Thiel's history...and it's demise at the hands of new owners - delving through all the Thiel articles and comments on Thiel at the time.
It's hard to think of any other high end figure who garnered so much sincere admiration and good will from writers, industry folk and audiophiles, as Jim Thiel.
JA - the whole thing was exciting. Beginnings are cleaner and purer and closer to the heart. We were exploring new territory from a first-principles perspective free from the prejudices that formal education or credentials would have imposed. Some form of progress was made every single day through decades of endeavor.
Prof - our measuring scheme was rigorous and thorough. But, being a bootstrap skunkworks, we created everything ourselves. We began with a rented HP dual trace scope and calibrated mic. We built a sandbox in the field - literally, sand - to bury the cabinet face-up to learn the 2pi, non diffracted, infinite baffle response. Later came hoisting the speaker into the walnut tree for free-field response. The mic was hung on a conduit, first 6' out and then a 10' joint - Hey! that's it! Outdoors we could use sine wave sweeps, but indoors the boundary reflections muddied the mix - so Jim designed and built 'the bleeper' an interrupted ⅓ octave stepped pulse automated signal generator: 3 cycles, one to accelerate, one to measure and one decelerate - advance ⅓ octave. The kids grew up 'singing' bleep, bleep. bleep from 20Hz to 20kHz. The breeze settles down after sunset for an hour or so of high quality measurements to analyze later in the night lab session. This scene is Georgetown Road, the country house where it began. The development lab stayed there for a couple of years after production expanded into Nandino Boulevard. At Nandino Jim's first lab there was 20 x 20 x 20'. Cubes are not good, but that corner could be walled off. The adjacent back parking lot was 150' x very long, perhaps 500' to first reflection. Outdoor ground-plane measurements materialized with live reference recording and test playback in the same environment. Our building was 100' x 300' and we built a roof access stairway to that 'infinite plane' with virtually no reflections 360°. Cable snakes dropped to the lab below for data recording. The final lab was pretty nice. Office / lab was 20' x 20' x 8' ceiling with a same-size balcony above, all connected to a soundproof room 17' high under 3' insulation x 20' x 32.5' (golden ratio) long plus the 20' balcony above the office. I would call the room quasi anechoic. We covered the walls and floor reflective points with layered sonic insulation and made a measuring tower 6.5' high (golden ratio) for a low reflection - highly intelligible environment. In other words, we knew exactly what the room was adding to the free-field measurements. Drivers were tested in an infinite baffle (flat wall) to identify diffraction effects in the cabinets. We compared everything to its base state. Time domain (diffraction, delays, internal reflections, etc.) must be engineered as temporal distortions. (Many designers treat those effects in the frequency domain, which is fundamentally incorrect.) We compared the incrementally improved 'bleeper', truncated noise, sine sweeps, etc. to commercial measurement devices and chose to keep Jim's stuff due to cost performance analysis in a small, frugal rapid growth environment. (New Thiel bought a Klippel System, which no one has used and Rob is now incubating.
Of critical importance is that Jim knew intimately the behavior of every aspect of the design and understood how they related to each other and the global perfection he sought. In this lab in the late 80s during the development of the CS5, which used best of form European drivers from Focal and MB, we judged that we could make a better tweeter than we could buy. The development of the CS5 aluminum dome tweeter (eventually also used in the 2.2 and 3.6) was driven by Jim's adoption of Finite Element Analysis. We took a pretty deep bite in cost and learning curve and, on the second try, took on FEI for all further developments. The dramatic reductions (10X+) in distortion due to motor subtleties - the copper shunt rings, pole and top plate shapes, cone geometries, etc. - were all facilitated by FEI. I know of no other company, large or small, that optimized such minute details.
All of these techniques are but half the picture. Every single exploration was co-developed by ear. Jim, Kathy and I each brought value to that equation and eventually we added a naive listener component for additional input. (I think I've talked about that.) Technical "improvements" were always vetted by listening, and often failed if they didn't sound at least as good after as before. Equally, options which sounded "better" were rejected if they compromised any aspect of technical performance. That bit separated Thiel from others. We required that every advance had to meet listening and measured criteria and if both were not simultaneously satisfied, then we went back to work. Our development cycle, even with successive learning, took years in the beginning and by the mid 90s was down to 9 months (like a baby), and that was a magnificent accomplishment, and orchestration, considering the extreme rigor involved.
Our listening room at the factory was in the lab, but nearly every night the product under development went home to the Georgetown Road farmhouse. We knew that room thoroughly well and it was a good room. I've mentioned the dimensions. Nice, not square, 10' ceiling, 45° bay windows, doors in the corners for bass vents, gypsum plaster on wood lath. Pretty sweet. We also used some other rooms including a plaster on brick with 12' ceiling in a downtown Victorian. Before 1990 we built the listening room at the factory. Soundproof. Quiet. Stiff walls and ceiling. Coves above lighting valence at the top edges. 12' high x 19.5' wide x 27' long - controlled decay dimensions, big enough that demure sound panels could control reflections. A truly lovely, neutral room which became the principle aural lab and demonstration room. We hosted many dealers, reviewers and other interested parties there. In 2012 I visited when the 2.7 final prototypes arrived. What a sweet reverie comparing them to 3.7s and 7.2s with the serious drive train in that room that I had built. I loved it. And I may not be participating here had that visit not happened.
I think that tells you much of the tenor of the undertaking. It was both scientifically serious as well as holistically grounded. It remained focused on music and its requirements while satisfying the demands of scientific engineering. For a small self-funded enterprise, it was genuine and rigorous beyond what any visitor imagined. And there were visitors from universities and large companies you would recognize. They invariably asked 'how can you do this'? And the answer was "because we love it'.
Such is the longer personal telling of Thiel's approach. The details would fill a book. I hope this narrative provides enough for you to appreciate some of what went into creating those speakers through which you enjoy your music. "For the Love of Music" was our first motto.
you guys nailed it when Jim optimized for an 8' - 12' listening distance. Agreed, the ear-brain does have much musical information to sort out under this type of testing condition(s). It would appear that team Thiel really had fun in those early days of research and development (R&D).
Beetle - indeed the 2 meter (80") distance is fairly valid. Ordinary speakers don't care much about distance since their drivers are not producing an integrated wavefront, but rather relying on the ear-brain to sort out the phase information. In the case of Thiel coherence, driver integration focuses into an integrated wavefront at about 8' where the measurements would be smoother and room-fill would be more even. 50" graphs are misleading, but 80" graphs are more than OK, certainly showing Thiel in the top tier. But 3 meter (10') are qualitatively better. We optimized for 8'- 12'.
I guess it's just personally disappointing to see all the effort that went into ruler-flat response being presented as less than its actual in-room / as-heard performance. Note that the coax drivers remove much of the mic-proximity degrade, since the more critical upper XO is fixed within the coax propagation geometry. Only the lower XO varies with distance and ear height. And that lower XO is more forgiving due to longer wavelengths and less directional specificity.
Point of History: In the O3 development in the late 70s, We mocked up a tri-ax with a 12"woofer with a huge diameter voice coil to allow a 4"x 1" upper driver coax in it. It was fantasy at that time; it took decades to develop real drivers moving toward that vision. In the mythical world, given resources, time & market, Jim would have developed a triaxial coincident driver. In today's world with Jim's wavy diaphragm, focused rare earth magnets and magnesium or carbon membranes, such a driver would be feasible. Youth has its potentials. _
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