Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply. I feel good now with your info,
Thanks,-Andy
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!
13,494 responses Add your response
Hello Everyone: I will be pulling my CS3's out of storage after the holidays and trying them in a bi-amp application, which I've never done before. I'll try SS for the low/mid frequency input and Tube for the high frequency input. Am I correct in assuming that the frequency range that the bass equalizer manages is purely within the low/mid frequency range? Does anyone here know the upper limit of that range? Thank You, Jim |
Jim - You are correct, the EQ circuit boosts the bass starting at 300Hz to 12dB at 25Hz. Our initial intent was to EQ the woofer and leave the midrange and tweeter unaffected, but the slow XO slopes required grouping the woofer and midrange to keep the frequency response correct - resulting in far less efficacy for the bi-amp idea. Note that any perceived differences in the upper range caused by the EQ are indeed real. They are artifacts. In that regard the CS3.5 EQ was a performance advance, and is a drop-in swap. Note that the bi-amp configuration caused more problems than it solved. For one thing the tweeter-only amp is a lot of cost for little return. Also, to maintain proper frequency response, the two amps must provide equal gain into these particular loads, which is far from trivial. Likewise, the cables must be the same as well as same lengths to maintain proper time alignment. Our rather extensive testing confirmed that a single amp and single cable always outperformed the bi configuration. Going forward, we swam upstream with that single input approach.
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Hi Tom - Lots of experimentation and solid results. No viable manufacturing capability yet. The wire / cable journey has been a very deep dive. My solution is unique, effective and manufacturable. I have benefited from Ray Kimber, Mike Morrow, Steve Hill (Straightwire), Cardas and Galen Gerais at Iconoclast / Belden. My bottom line is that stranded wire is inferior to solid wire. Extruded insulations do harm, even the revered PTFE. Dielectric effects and signal propagation integrity are far more important than metallurgy. Connectors matter a lot. Since my cable contains proprietary elements, I must be careful and incomplete in what I say. The hookup wire is gauged per driver. Bigger than big enough is too big. Each polarity leg consists of 2 half-sized conductors to raise the skin-effect saturation point. Cable is star-quad with a core drain to ground static charges, especially on drivers. The core drain provides some shielding (shading) without the tunnel effects of an external shield sheath. Drain and signal pairs are decoupled via counter-rotation and spacing. Individual wires are enameled at 0.00075" film thickness for qualitatively lower effective dielectric constant than any insulation, including PTFE. Cable layup uses round spacers to isolate wires with minimal (tangential-only) contact. Therefore most of the isolating is done via air-space. Having no conventional insulation, the cable has very little body. Its integrity is supplied by fastening to cabinet walls and braces via adhesion to natural cork and cotton string tie-down. This exoskeleton wire becomes part of the cabinet and therefore is connectned to the crossovers and drivers via concentric / axial connectors. Routing is more carefully away from driver fields, as are crossovers which are now on multiple boards to decrease field interactions between components. There is a family of analog cables. Signal interconnects as RCA and XLR, speaker cables terminated in either locking bananas or GR Research Electras (Hint: Propagation field integrity matters most) as well as internal wire harness. Obviously my 2024 introduction date is wrong. But, continual progress is being made. |
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Speaking of internal speaker wiring, I am currently working on two pairs of speakers: Infinity RS-II (above, c 1982) use 24 AWG stranded conductor throughout, from binding posts to drivers, often tightly bundled together ProAc Point Five (above, c 2004) use Straight Wire-brand dual twisted-pair cable that looks like 10ish AWG. It strikes me as two extremes. The Point Fives’ selection of drivers nowhere near calls for such plus-sized cabling. Inversely, the RS-II love gobs of current to reveal their best, probably straining the electrical limits of its long runs of doorbell wire... Interestingly, both speakers use the same gauge wire for all drivers, which also seems counterintuitive. My apologies for the off-topic-ish post, it’s just that ever since I started delving into these speakers I’ve been really intrigued by how radically different their internal wiring is. [EDIT] I attempted to insert pics obviously, and they showed fine in Edit and Preview modes but got stripped from the post. No time to solve this mystery right now :) My apologies
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devinplombierThe role of audio wire/cable has been routinely underestimated by mainstream engineering. However, in aerospace and now in high-speed digital technology, wire has risen to the status of a system-limit - and therefore importance. There are some design engineers who state that audio cable is a large multiple more complex than digital cable. Audio must support radical changes of voltage and current with back-forces. The problems are real and the solutions difficult. The speakers you cite are taking their best guesses and engineering solutions within their defined parameters. Those parameters, understandings and blind spots vary widely among designers. Welcome to the murky world of audio engineering. My recent deep dive builds on Thiel's history. In 1977-8, we faced the daunting task of whether we would tackle the impossible dream of coherence. We found that a coherent source showed glaring problems which vanished when reverting to normal high-order, non-coherent topologies. A near deal-breaker was a persistent gritty, homogenized haze in the coherent iteration that defied our attempts to understand and mitigate. Our aerospace-physicist (non-audio enthusiast) cousin made a visit, heard the problem and suggested we all (everyone) were hearing the effects of inter-strand cross-talk as learned from deep space probe image retrieval. Lesson learned included how our audio neurology processes coherent audio input at qualitatively higher scrutiny than non-coherent input, which it categorizes as artificial and less important. I suggest that you would hear significant, qualitative differences between your two, or any, cable scenarios if using a coherent source such as Dunlavy, Thiel or Vandersteen, whereas those differences would fade to near meaningless with any non-coherent speaker. My present work is, of course, with Thiel speakers. I've used the CS2.2, 3.5, and now extensively the SCS4. But the lessons apply to all speakers, and become meaningful for all coherent speakers. I thought that Thiel's 1978 model 03 brought the use of solid, rather than stranded wire, but we later learned that Dahlquist (from aerospace) used 18 gauge solid in the DQ10 darling of the day. Our 18-2 solid twisted pair in teflon spanned Thiel's whole timeline with critical comparative re-evaluation in 1988 for the CS5 and again for the 2007 CS3.7. Regarding variable gauges for frequencies - the differences are subtle, but again, become meaningful for coherent sources. The math that describes propagation in wire diverges in the lower audio frequencies. Below 1kHz the rules get squishy and below 100Hz the rules diverge. Bass frequencies are supported with greater propagation integrity with conductors with lower surface to core ratios. So larger gauges are 'better'. Happily, skin effect saturation frequency also decreases since woofers are attenuated in the upper audio octaves. The soup of interactive ingredients is extremely complex. The cable that I have developed makes sonic and measured advances without harm in Thiel's coherent topology. |
Tom Based on what I vision a solid core wire would be more coherent than a stranded cable. A solid core will have 1 single path vs a multitude of paths of many fine wires as a group..resulting in group delay? I sold and owned Dunlavy speakers. He had his own wire that he used and appeared to be multi strand like and offset like twin lead antenna wire. Of course Dunlavy had patents on antenna design that were used in the military. Again you make me think of the 48 strand 8 gauge Litz.inductors used on my ribbon Tweeter. Said to have a bandwidth of nearly 40k. Other styles are said to have much lower bandwidth which may be fine for the frequency range of any given woofer or midrange. But the counter of that is any wire touching another insulated wire wound or twisted in any geometry has to interact with the intimate wire next to it I try to use the same group type of everything thing to maintain symmetry of sound and coherence..such as wire caps and inductors. Nice to hear a choir to speak with one great voice. That's the goal for me and most others who visit here. TomD
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Yep - those 48 strands work out to 25awg good to 85kHz saturation / 2 for layup loss. All good except. My quibble is that a tweeter works around 5 watts for negligible current demand. Meanwhile that entire conductive mass must be charged and discharged at every cycle. A single pair of 25awg per leg would allow simple helical layup, carry the required current and produce greater, audible immediacy. You could read that immediacy as a shorter up-ramp of the onset transient with a cleaner initial onset and peak reversal. You're 'one great voice' is a good visual. My mantra is 'vivid solidity'. You know it when you hear it. The dozens of cables I've tested all sacrificed that vivid solidity enough that I felt compelled to take Thiel's original solution to the next level. Obviously that's a different place than the vast majority of brands have gone. Indeed some Thiel upgraders have gone to various stranded solutions and liked the outcome. I prefer and am perpetuating Thiel's pursuit. |
@pablohoney - north east florida |
I'll vouch for the 1.2 as being the first second-generation Thiel speaker. It preceded the CS5 and as such was the working trial for our first copper motor shunts, and aluminum dome tweeter. This was the first product to benefit from our investment in Finite Element Analysis. And it shows. The CS1.2 is one sweet speaker as is, plus it lends itself very well to XO component upgrades. |
May I join the club? I recently brought home a pair of CS7 speakers and have been soaking in audio nirvana since. Big imposing speakers much too large for my room (temporary), yet they completely disappear when the music starts. And the bass...OMG. Just one thing... Does a manual exist for this speaker? The Internet is saturated with literature on the 7.2, but I'm finding nothing on the 7. |
Does anyone have any insights on how the 2.4 compares to the 5i? I am currently using the 2.4, but a pair of 5i popped up close to me and the opportunity to own a top-of-the-line-model is hard to resist. They are a bit older than the 2.4 though and the 2.4 gets very high praise, which makes me wonder how their performance compares. |
guy48065 Welcome! Good to see you here as well. Nice score on those CS7 loudspeakers. We have a few fans/owners of models CS7/CS 7.2 on The Panel. Stay tuned until one of our experts chimes in to address your query. I look forward in reading more about your Musical tastes and System.
Happy Listening! |