Thiel Owners

hi Jafant,  i am a huge PS fan.  I have a new P15 power regenerator on the way to me and it should be here soon.  I think those are a must have for most systems as they do so much good with no harm at all to the sound.  The unit that it is replacing,  the P10,  made such a great difference in the sound.  Much more open and expansive and detailed.

I promise i do not work for PS Audio, but if their BHK amps are in the budget,   they should be auditioned.   I find them to be a  fantastic match with my current 3.7's and my former 2.7's. 

Great system Silvanik, my favorite all-time speakers!

One more thought for folks on a budget.  Bel Canto 300S amps can be had for around $700 on the used market and are a good match for the Thiels and might even change your mind about Class D.  To my ears its better than powering them with 90% of the lower priced  solid state gear out.

Currently I'm driving my pair of Cs 3.6 with a McCormack DNA-2 and find the performance very enjoyable even at very low volume, dynamic sound with right presence of bass, clear and refined mids and highs, I can say I'm very satisfied!
Happy to be a (Italian.. :-)  ) member of this virtual Thiel's  family.... and ever thanks Jim, your genius will live forever.

Good to see you - brayeagleThank You for sharing so much of your personal life and Audio journey.You have lived some kind of life, including World Travel as it pertains to music, at large. An Audiophile and refined Gentleman of our hobby at its core. May we all live and prevail to the age of 95. I would not wish to go any sooner frankly speaking.

Happy Listening!

Welcome! pwhinson
the CS 2.4 is a honey of a loudspeaker. Very easy to drive and matches gear easily. I will second Bryston gear specifically with the CS 2.4 and CS 2.4SE.  Thank You for sharing your aural experience w/ Bel Canto, Red Dragon. The 4B3 is on my must demo list. It will be fun to compare a 4B-ST/4B-SST and 4B-SST2, all of which, I have spent much time. Those sonic signatures are still ingrained in my mind.
Air, decay, space of instruments, texture and timbre are the most important characteristics portrayed by any Power amp. I look forward in reading more about you and your system.
Happy Listening!

I recently had an opportunity to audition a pair of Bel Canto Ref600 monos for a week, followed by four days with a new Bryston 4b3 on my Thiel 2.4s.  My preamp is an Aesthetix Janus.  I also had the Red Dragon Audio Class D stuff, both a pair of the 500M monos based on an IcePower board and the 500S based on a Pascal board.  I had to rule out the Red Dragon stuff because on my system they sounded for lack of a better word "digital."  The decay on notes seemed unusually long and unnatural with both the Red Dragon options and the stereo amp based on the Pascal board which is supposed to have some special engineering in it unique to Pascal sounded considerably brighter than the Icepower based monos.  The Red Dragon amps (both flavors) WERE very dynamic, a little threadbare in the midrange and while they weren't bad, especially for the money, I wouldn't be able to live with them so back they went.  I wanted to try some Class D stuff because I actually had pretty good experience with some of the earlier Bel Canto Products, that is the 300M and the 300S amps.  Those amplifiers did alot "right" at low and moderate volumes but at high volumes they seemed to struggle and compress a bit.  Not a good permanent match.  That's why I had HIGH hopes for the new Bel Canto Ref 600s.  Those hopes were quickly dashed by my finding that in my system the Ref 600s, while having a unique immediacy to the sound and being very dynamic and having a very fleshed out nice midrange and lower midrange and bass, seemed to be fairly significantly recessed throughout the upper midrange and I blame that tonal anomaly for the lack of "air" in the presentation.  Very dynamic, imaged exceedingly well but no cigar on the Ref600s.  I couldn't live with them.  Then the Bryston went in for four days and it was a breath of fresh air.  Extremely neutral, beautiful delicate highs, very good (but not great) imaging, great bass both taut and tuneful, never ran out of gas even when driving the speakers louder than I'd normally.  The only thing about the Bryston is that at high volumes I found listening to them a little fatiguing.  They seem (to me) to be great studio or lab appliances and if you want total utter neutrality the Bryston may be your best bet.  I will also say I heard the Bryston squared series many years ago and thought they were hard and brittle.  With the new cubed series that problem is largely gone and the highs are beautifully rendered, cymbals shimmer and everything has the right timbre without being overly etched.  But its definitely in no way a "romantic" view into the music.  Listening to orchestral music the Bryston was mid to mid-rear in the hall, there was no forward midrange that in other amps something shifts the perspective a little closer to the stage.  So The Bryston is still in the running, and I'm looking to try one of the XA series Pass products but I'm still deciding on which one(s) to go with for the trial.  I'll report back on my findings.  I hope this is at least somewhat helpful.  Its difficult to adequately describe (for me anyway) in words the differences between the amplifiers but I'll continue to try.

Thanks Tom, I also have a set of series 2 still in use. Helps to have a historical perspective and appreciate all the work that went into it. If somebody wrote a book about thiel history it might make a fascinating movie.

I pulled it off, as there was too much extraneous stuff in it for a real answer to your query.
Yes, I learned about and really came to appreciate classical music via the old Red Seals, 77, 45, LP. reel-to-reel and CD recordings. Additionally, I began listening to classical FM stations in the 50s. I was fortunate to be able to see some operas at the Met, the Chicago Lyric and Washington DC Kennedy Center. My Air Force career and subsequent employment let me attend performances of symphonies and opera in Vienna, London, Milan,Rome, Paris and Germany. What still sticks in my mind is Risa Stevens in Carmen, Christoff in Faust, Ramey in Boris and Mestopholese, and attending the Volksioper, where we saw Boris - - sung in German! And, the Anonymous Four’s concert, sung from the middle of the Nave in the National Cathedral.
I’ve never been a true high-end audio guy - - just building and buying things to let me sit back and enjoy recorded music without picking apart the reproduction, per se. I wanted to listen to the music, and not the equipment.
Beginning by building speakers (using Thiele-Small where possible), I came to believe speakers ARE what define excellent reproduction, and so my quest has been to find speakers that will let me listen to the music and performances I know and love. Just a few thoughts

hi BrayEagle,   thank you for a wonderful post.  what a great story.  it is so neat that at 95 you are still enjoying audio,  and no longer using a cactus needle as a stylus.  what happened to your post.  it has disappeared. 

Prof - From the beginning in '74-'75 the goal was to find the best platform on which to build a line. We investigated (translate designed and built) spherical arrays, line sources, panels, folded horns, powered multi-driver speakers, and I may be forgetting a few. Phase coherence was in the list of goals, but not found to be practical. The first real product to take shape, the Model O1, incorporated what we could achieve in practical terms within our constraints. Its strengths were very high efficiency (94dB?) with its equalized sealed box bass, built on a custom driver by Eminence, who built stage drivers for Peavey and others. That driver had a huge magnet, good thermal management, long excursion and good linearity, but with a normal, overhung voice coil; the best that we could find for our needs. BTW, better than SEAS, Dynaudio, etc. The tweeter to match was a Long Engineering 1.5" mylar dome with good performance. Jim messed with first and second order filters for that product and landed on 3rd - 18dB slopes as the most practical solution. It was fairly linear, bass below 30Hz and a not too refined treble in a medium bookshelf package in all the wood finishes Thiel became known for.

We gathered a following, especially due to some serendipitous European export opportunities. Dealers wanted a more refined, audiophile product and Jim developed the O2 as a response to demand more than his own ambition. It was a ported 6.5" Seas treated paper woofer under a 1" Peerless silk dome with second order slopes. It delivered a more refined presentation, trading off bass response and some efficiency. I think it came in around 90dB and served as a stepping stone into the emerging audiophile market, which really hadn't gelled yet.

By 1977 we had attended our first CES and had enough distribution to figure out that we had to do something unique, memorable, extraordinary to carve out a meaningful niche. The next year and a half of extreme difficulty went into developing the O3 as a minimum phase transducer. We went to our second show with a second order O3 as backup because EVERYTHING mattered so much more when phase coherence was added to the formula. There were deficiencies that were later solved. We mustered our courage and presented the Minimum Phase version, having the rectangular normal tower in the closet, just in case. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and we never looked back to normalcy.

That sounds smoother than it was. We faced another year of tracking down weird stuff such as magnetic eddies, wire anomalies, diffraction and so forth, all of which were sonically invisible with high order filters, but glaringly obvious with first order. The ear-brain interpreted the sound as "real" and held it to a higher standard than regular canned sound. That's a big subject, but I must sign off for this evening. 

Pray tell BrayEagle,   what is your secret or secrets. 95 and still enjoying audio.  that is so wonderful.  i think daily doses of music we love keeps us young.  My mother's 95 year old boyfriend (who looks and acts about 70) would add red wine to the list of things to keep you young,   He loves going to live classical concerts and he would travel 60 miles to hear a string quartet concert as well. 

tomthiel,

Can you tell me:  what was Jim's thinking about loudspeaker design before he started producing time/phase coherent speakers?

I still have my old Thiel 02 (circa 76' ?) and love them.   Was Jim going for flat response as a main attribute...or any other salient goals before he was captured by time/phase coherence?

Thanks.

Yes, aczel is interesting. 😬 I figured you had to be 95+. I did the math.

Peter Aczel attempted with the Audio Critic to reconcile the objectivist with the subjectivist models of evaluation. A watershed event was his endorsement of Andy Rappaport's AMP-1 which was a zero feedback, highly coherent power amp that carried significant noise, which Aczel allowed as a successful amplifier design.
Peter Moncrieff went even farther with his International Audio Review by devising new measurement techniques to support his (generally brilliant) subjective interpretations.
Julian Hirsch preceded these guys and set the stage for evaluative techniques to educate the masses. However, his reliance on measurements denied the possibility of sonic differences if they couldn't be measured. He wrote more broadly than for Stereo Review, but his approach was consistent, often summarized as: "Of all the products I've heard, this is certainly one of them."

By the early 80s Thiel had established strong retail presence in the NYC area. One of our very supportive and influential NYC dealers convinced us, over our considerable resistance, to have Julian review one of our products. (I'm sorry I don't remember which, but probably the 01, 02 or 03.) A review appeared in Stereo Review and a related article in the New York Times. (Something besides Bourbon comes to the real world from Kentucky!) The response was overwhelming; Thiel had somehow become legitimate in the minds of many thousands of readers by getting JH's stamp of approval. Note that none of that dealer interest was appropriate for an emerging high-end speaker manufacturer, and we did not sell direct to consumers. Those articles produced a flurry of activity that disrupted the ephemeral path of growth we were on. However it did serve our education regarding what game we were in, which was not Stereo Review's game.

The emerging high end at that time, considered JH and Stereo Review to be solidly Mid-Fi, which was dominated by Bose and Bang & Olufsen. JH's drumbeat of endorsement of Bose served as a cornerstone of the establishment of the high end. "If Bose is as good as it gets, then I (aspiring dealer, manufacturer, etc.) have a real shot at survival" was a consistent mantra of the emerging high end.

OOPS  Misspelled Pete's name.  Should be Aczel

I still have Issue #1 of The Audio Critic (and all the rest) Peter Azcel was an interesting writer. Being trained as a electrical engineer, I followed his articles with interest.   btw: I'm 95+ (really!)

damn.  should have said quit, not quite.  i need to preview my posts first.

those were the days before TAS and Stereophile started making headway.   But by 1978 or so i quite reading SR and followed TAS and HP.  I am 65,  so officially old :).   Julian was from the school that said if you could not measure it,  it was not a discernible difference. 

rankest,

I do remember Julian, and read many of his articles in Stereo Review and elsewhere.    (BTW: We were both about the same age)

sheesh.   should have said "who here", not who hears. i should not post this late in the day :)

who hears remembers Julian Hersch,  aka Mr. "if it measures the same it sounds the same" from the 70's?

Beetle - that distinction may be the watershed between hi fi and high end. Hi fi, dominated by academic engineers, mathemeticians and physicists definitely listened with their fore-brains and negated the existence that couldn't at least be verified by double-blind ABX tests. High end, on the other hand, broke through myriad barriers because they/ we believed what we heard. When the cats payed attention, we really took something seriously . . . the cats didn't even read the specs.

break-in is something that many engineering-oriented observers dismiss as voodoo or make-believe or user acclimation. From the very beginning, we perceived its reality beyond question, but have never developed any definitive causal narrativeeyond question, but have never developed any definitive causal narrative

Yes, thanks for sharing this perspective, Tom. I completely agree. I’ve experienced break-in not just from speakers but from electronics and, even, cables. Just because we can’t explain or measure it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. 

Wow. I’m so relieved to hear that things I don’t fully/technically understand I am able to HEAR. I fell in love with Thiel not because of what the specs are but the way these speakers SOUND. 

I almost feel proud. 

One advantage a manufacturer has is the ability to compare samples with 0 to hundreds of burn-in hours. Speakers, cables, caps. Very interesting what one hears with an open mind.

Happy Friday- All.

From the Thiel 2.7 Owner’s Information:

"The CS2.7s, like most speakers, require a period of playing before they perform optimally. The time required depends on how loudly the speakers are played; more time is required if played softly, less if played loudly. At least 200 hours at moderately loud levels are required before the speaker is performingnear optimum. You should notice even more improvement after 300-400 hours of playing."

Prof - at Thiel we all began as skeptics. Through thousands of experiments over dozens of years, we gradually adopted the Modus Operandi of believing what we hear, rather than what we understand. There are countless ways to lack cognition of experience. Trust your ears.

music lovers may want to read this article on how to protect our valuable hearing.

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/07/26/how-to-treat-tinnitus.aspx?utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20180726Z1_UCM&et_cid=DM223863&et_rid=375695806

Tom, thanks.  Some form of mechanical break in sounds plausible to me for speakers.

makes sense.  thanks

ronkent

Another  reason for a manufacturer to burn in electronic devices is to ensure they continue to work to specifications under the advertised voltages and loads. If solid state components are to fail, they'll do it very early on.  It's for the sake of the warranty.