Thiel Owners

Someone bought my Thiel 3.7s.



Fortunately the buyer is arranging pick up from my house, where they will be put on a pallet by the shipping company.



That has still of course left me with packing them in to their boxes. Wow...not easy! It took a loooong time just to get the first one in to it’s box, with some trial and error along the way. After hours, the top totally fitted and taped up madly, it turned out the bottom of the speaker wouldn’t quite fit all the way in to the box. Rob Gillum was very helpful in advising me through this issue to the right solution (which of course, my fault, meant unboxing the damned thing and re-doing everything).

I lost count of the number of times I muttered under my breath "Never another big speaker...never another big speaker...."

(That is, until, some other big speaker catches my eye. But I’m pretty sure this has cured me of getting another big ol’ heavy speaker, as wonderful sounding as the 3.7s have been).

oblgny
which ARC model?  You have had some sweet gear over the years.I really enjoy reading about all of the gear that has resided in your system.
Happy Listening!

Good to see you- silvanik
nice system. I look forward in reading more about your musical tastes.Happy Listening!

jafant...

Yes, I had a BAT VK3i preamp with that Pass for a little while. (cheap seats model from BAT)

In retrospect I believe I preferred ARC by just a hair. Hard to remember exactly why but IMHO the Audio Research player somewhat “brighter” than the BAT - which I prefer overall. Thiels “ too bright ?”   My butt!

Kudos to both manufacturers however in that on the used market they get pretty stable price-wise.  I sold both my ARC and BAT preamps at or close to the price I paid for them.  (Excluding the cost of the tubes, obviously) Most of the other things I’ve sold here I took a 10-15% depreciation on. 

BAT & Pass Labs match very well. 

silvanick...

The HapZ1es is a truly excellent piece.  I got mine “used” from a fellow member here on the site for $1200 - which they currently fetch now.  VERY worth one’s while.  

What I enjoyed about it most was it’s simplicity.  I didn’t want a “computer” or a computer interface anywhere near my stereo.  I had a Bluesound Vault2 prior to that but had difficulty in getting it set up correctly so...off it went.  The ease of loading my cd collection was very much appreciated - a cheap Apple usb cd drive did the trick.  While the Sony and every other server/player/streamer is slooooow in doing so, the HAP excelled at adding my tunes via WiFi as well. That too was slow but I could slap many tunes there and batch load.  Really well made product.  

Well, I'm glad to share with you my full (actually very simple!) system, as already said it's composed by Thiel C3.6 loudspeaker, McCormack DNA-2 amp, Sony HAP Z1ES and a handmade (by me) passive volume control, only one input, based on a TKD 2511 series pot with remote control. In order to avoid any kind of interference from the power supply of the pot motor I used a 9V battery to supply  it .
The internal hd of the Z1ES is loaded with Flac, Wave and DSD files, to me this machine sound superbly but  probably not very  common between audiophile community, the DAC quality and the very short internal signal path make the trick, it cost around 2000$ but to get the same performance you have to compare it with a dac three four time its value.... in my opinion, furthermore no computer need, just one box solution, great!

Robin -  Yes, the SmartSubs are Class D. Jim began working on those amps with a very talented designer at/from Vifa in the late 80s. They put quite a bit of sophistication into those designs, which were done in the early dark ages of Class D. Impedance requirements are less of an issue when the entire amp-speaker is modeled  in toto. I use a single SS1 and a pair of SS2s in my studio and love them. I am searching for a good repair solution for them.

I have heard that Jim considered Class D suitable only for bass due to inherent topology constraints. But, a lot has advanced more recently. I have heard recent pro-audio class D amps, and I would not consider such for my music use, just because, no real experience, but an inclination toward a topology with more inherent wow. I am intrigued by what PS is doing (thank you ronkent) . . . a tube input before a mosfet output stage seems potentially great. 

Regarding Pass, Nelson is a brilliant designer in my opinion. Pass and Thiel shared equipment and insights beginning in the late 70s. I would expect Kent's opinion about synergy to be extremely well-informed.

pwhinson...

I also did business with Mark at Reno on two X150.5 amps and to say that he runs a class operation is an understatement. 

At the time I had a pair of CS3.5’s. (the amps were purchased at different times)  Like the first time I heard my first Thiels (2.2) I barely returned to my listening position before I went “wow.”

From top to bottom that amp just clutched the music in a way no previous amp had managed to; although I forget which preamp I had at that time it was a tube preamp.  The 3.5’s had a new lease on life in so many ways. (yes, I employed the bass eq at all times)

i have not heard the X150.8 but I’m sure it’s a fine match.  

Enjoy!

Well after reading everything I can lay my hands on relating to Pass I had pretty much decided on a pair of XA60.8’s. That is until I spoke again to Mark at Reno Hifi and Kent at Pass who BOTH steered me away from the XA series and toward an X150.8. This was not a "gentle" steering that was a rather opinionated steering toward the X series. I’ve never had a retailer before talk me out of spending $10K in favor spending $5K but that what Reno did and also what Kent at Pass did. NOW, I like the idea of a slightly softer, highly dimensional liquid tube like sound and that’s why I was considering the XA series. But both Kent and Mark seemed to think that the X series was the better match for Thiels. I’m a little stunned but I think I’m going to follow their advice and try an X150.8. Anyone else with opinions on the matter please chime in. They did clarify one thing: that if you DO go with the XA series they both though the 60.8 would be right amp in the series for Thiel 2.4s. In the X series, they favored the X150.8.  I realize all this sounds quite odd because most of you are saying just LISTEN and see what you like best.  Well there's no Pass dealer within even a reasonable driving distance of Atlanta so that's not possible.  Yes I COULD order both an x150.8 and a pair of XA 60.8s and return the ones I don't like but we're talking $200 in shipping for each amp, each way so that ads up in a hurray.  Still..... might actually do it.

Tom, aren't the smartsubs a class D switching amplifier? I was always curious about the power output at lower impedance.

I caution that we should distinguish between makes & models rather than commenting on "class D amps" in general. A lot of progress has been made with switching rates and filters so that some class D amps are leagues ahead of other class D amps.

pwhinson - thanks for the insight into how the Bel Canto Ref600s sound with the 2.4s; it seems Class D amps are generally not favored for Thiels but this is the first time I have heard details as to why for any specific make/model, and I have been wondering about these amps specifically because of their generally excellent reviews.  I also wonder about the PS Audio Stellar M700s (or even the S300) for the same reason.  Anyone else out there with ears-on experience with other Class D amps paired with Thiels?

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 :)