Merry Christmas! ALL
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!
13,577 responses Add your response
ars888888
How tall are the ceilings? What part of the country are you in as you can stop by to hear what set up I have. Im in NC |
lars888888The CS5i take significant amps to power them and wake them up.I clip Pass Mono amps with the CS5i but not the CS7.2. The larger Thiel's need more effort to set up and the right room. I've heard people criticize Thiel's for sounding bright. This is the design of the speaker working against a poor room. They are incredibly engaging speakers when dialed in. Your 2.4 are far more forgiving than their siblings. If you can get a Pure Class A amp with plenty of current you will be rewarded. i will see if i can upload a few photos when i get back from holiday.
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I keep keeping an eye out for a nice pair of CS5i, so maybe someday I'll have to deal with the question of what to drive them with. I have Classé monoblocks that are 200w into 8 ohms and 400w into 4 ohms. I'm hoping they might be up to the task, and I'm curious - which Pass monoblocks clipped? Also which amps worked best in your experience? Thanks! |
devinplombierIf you have the space and amps then the CS5i will be a great purchase. I only clipped the amp on certain tracks that was bass heavy. I was testing my room boundaries so I was playing at a higher db than normal but still not extreme. I was using the Pass XA 200.5 on CS 5i . With the 7.2 the XA 200.5 drives that speaker wherever they may want to go. Unfortunately your Classé monoblocks will not be sufficient. They will sound constricted like a horse blanket was draped over them. From my experience, the Big Krell FPB series is the way to go with the CS 5i. They come up now and then that have been recapped with service papers. These are the mono amps you want to grab. You will not hear what the CS5i are capable without amps with dynamic head room that push lots of current. I'm speaking from experience once you hear the bottom end of the CS5i there is no going back. It is effortless in the lower register. Not saying the mids/highs are not pleasant. I signal the bass out as there are not many speakers that can go this low and to have the definition the CS5i have. Tom told me he believed, after almost 40 years of being introduced to the marketplace, there is not a sealed speaker cabinet that goes lower than the CS5i. I've been to a few audio sows these past few months, the last was Capitalfest, and there isnt a speaker under 60k Ive heard that I think could replace the CS 5i and I could happily live with. When Tom and Thiel Renaissance are underway, and the CS5i comes up for revisions that will be a great day. I have two pair. Authentic Brazilian Rosewood which the wood cost more than what the speakers sell for, and black walnut. The front baffles are incredible. Speaker over 100k do not have the quality and performance of the CS5i baffles. Maybe Tom can jump in and share his insight. Recently I had two well seasoned members come over for a listen on separate occasions. I played the tracks they wanted to hear first so they had their baseline. Going through a selected playlist I complied of 6-7 tacks i watched them with a confused look on their faces, No words exchanged until the audition was over regarding what they heard. When the audition concluded the adjectives that were used by both listeners on different occasions were siimilar. Skipping the audiophile jargon both said it felt like they were in the crowd for a live performance. Thats a mic drop moment as anything else committed doesnt hold weight.
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Sonic malaise, what a great phrase :) Some Apogees (Scintillas?) were basically one-ohm loads with dips down to .5 ohm if I recall. It sounds like CS-5 are difficult to drive in the low frequencies. Are they bi-ampable? What amps did the Thiel factory use? |
devinplombierWhat size listening room do you have? Ceilings? I'll share a story with you. in 2001-2002 I went to Nashville to Nichals to audition the CS 7.2. They had them mated with McIntosh Killowatt amps. The salesman was conservative with the volume. I gave him a CD I brought and asked for the remote. Once track was playing I hit the volume so it was playing at a decent volume around 92-95db. About 30 seconds in the red light started flashing on the McIntosh amps as they were clipping. I politely thanked the saleman for his time and left. From this dealer I went straight to Thiel in Lexington. I listened to the same Cs 7.2 but this time with Krell FPB 700 CX amp.It was a completely different sounding speaker. Lesson, the amps are crucial with the big Thiels. My reason to push the speakers and get currentt through them is to know the amp is up to the task and if I have enough dynamic headroom to handle transient peaks.
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devinplombierI don't know much about the Apogee line across the board. There are other high-end brands and models - Wilson Watts come to mind - that are have treacherously abrupt impedance swings with sub-1 ohm bottoms . . . and advertising that claims them easily driven. Thiel speakers present extremely resistive, non-reactive loads. But since their impedance is (too) low across the board, many amps just can't deliver the juice to drive them well. Duramax's advice is spot on. Listen to demanding material at high volume and assess the enjoyment / naturalness of your response. I find it less than productive to try to analyze and describe the nature of the failure(s) because there are so many interacting factors and such academic understanding isn't the goal. Finding worthy ancillary equipment is your goal. |
duramax747 My room is approx 32x16 with a 12’ listening triangle. My speakers are positioned halfway along the long walls, so about 15’ from the front wall. Re your Nashville auditions, I would hazard a guess that someone at the first shop mistakenly wired the Thiels to the 8 ohm taps of the McIntoshs. and tomthiel I agree 100% with the importance of adequate amplification. I got my Classé monoblocks to drive my Infinity RS-II, themselves interim speakers to tide me over until I get my "perfect" ones (the RS-II are great speakers btw and, despite the fact that I’ve probably spent more time so far working on them than listening to them, I’m growing quite fond of them). I am prepared to sell the Classés and get the amps to match whatever speakers I get eventually. jafant Thank you for the tip regarding the 3 CS5i in Florida. I would consider buying speakers online from a well regarded seller, though I would much prefer to buy locally here in the Pacific Northwest so that I can audition prior to purchase. I also want to say what a great source of high quality information this thread is! Thank you for creating and moderating it.
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tomthiel Thank You for the information on models CS5 and CS5i loudspeakers. A nice Thiel history lesson as well. Although I have not heard big Apogee loudspeakers, I can comment on model Slant 8. The Slant 8 and Thiel CS 2.4 are very close in presentation and sound. In a shoot out, the CS 2.4 wins as the speaker has better Bass output via its passive radiator. Both speakers exhibit excellent mid and upper range frequencies.
Happy Listening! |
devinplombierThats a good room for the CS 5i. I'm not sure what taps they used but the salesman seemed to be knowledgeable. Jafant Well, the man himself designed the room. When Tom and company come for an extensive audition I will tell more about the room as it is very unique in it's design. I will say this, at the listening chairs you only hear the wave from the drivers and no side wall/floor/ceiling reflections. No dampening in these areas as we wanted live acoustics and notb dead harmonics. The room is so well designed we did not even need a wool rug on Pz floors between the speakers and the listener. We tried and within 10 minutes we removed it. We were amazed that no rug was needed. I will get photos up soon. Any members in the NC area are welcome to stop by and hear the big Thiels.
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duramax - I'll be happy to ruminate on the CS5 baffle. The CS5 followed our 1987 CS3.5 which was a runaway hit, and our most expensive product to date at $2450/pair. Times were good, the market was hot and many manufacturers were presenting $20,000 statement speakers. Jim was extremely uncomfortable presenting anything over $5000/pair. So the CS5 actually represents quite an internal struggle. Contrary to statements that the CS5 was a 'cost no object' design, it actually carried compromises to keep its sell price well below $10K for a design with a natural price around $15K. Let's talk about the baffle as an example. The CS3.5 had a machined 2" MDF baffle with braces. We also fastened the drivers with 2" screws through the entire baffle thickness into hardened pilot holes to best distribute reactive loads. An equivalent baffle for the CS5 would have been 4" thick and still fall short on impulse integrity, and add significant size to the enclosure. To develop a relatively thin-wall baffle with significantly higher stiffness and hardness, I engaged a local marble shop (sinks and bathtubs) to make samples from shop-built molds. By using 3 marble grits we reduced the polyester binder resin to half of typical and increased the stiffness by nearly double while nearly eliminating ringing. That baffle was (I think) about 20mm (3/4+") thick providing considerable internal enclosure volume. We kept the overall size of the CS5 to no larger than an average woman. Jim invented a bass alignment that paralleled two subwoofers with a full range woofer such that all three were producing low bass at a declining impedance to draw additional power, but in a range that rarely has much musical content. It works and I hoped to apply the concept to further products, but we changed course to reflex bass due to its far lower cost and problems. Riffing on the baffle: we designed the cabinet around the shrink-factor of that 'dry' triple grit baffle pour. We also developed a dye process for the marble so we could use a clear gel-coat showing off the marble grain. A next-generation concept (we always looked well ahead) enhanced the triple-grit concept to include granite, basalt and marble for even lower resin content, higher stiffness, greater internal damping and a more stunning look. But from a more conservative viewpoint, Jim and Kathy re-budgeted the CS5 at $9300 retail, so we had to lose the dry triple-grit x clear nicesity. The 'normal' pour gave the baffle more shrinkage and the cabinet dimensions shrank a little for it to work. Somewhere around the first 50 pair of CS5s had black gelcoat polished directly off the mold. But mold maintenance had also been deleted from the budget and all the rest of the 500 pair model run were cast with a primer gelcoat and sprayed in-house with emron (aircraft epoxy). My production records showed that those 'budget' baffles cost considerably more than the original, superior baffles would have. Such things happen when non-manufacturing executives step in. As was our habit, we accumulated ideas for the CS5.2, which never came to be. The home theatre market was steam-rolling much of the esoteric high-performance marketplace. Jim wanted to go where he could design / develop more products faster, which was not a CS5.2. To a similar point, the sealed bass with its natural 12dB/octave in-phase and time aligned output was jettisoned for reflex bass in future products more or less because everyone else was getting away with it. That's a discussion for a different day. Another point is that Jim wanted the CS5 baffle to follow the tilted flat plane of our other products. That necessitated electronic bucket-brigade delay on the upper and lower midrange drivers accounting for nearly half the component count in that huge crossover. Those coils and caps are all in the signal-feed path, which creates most of the sonic reticence experienced in the CS5. Now, close your eyes and imagine an arc-plane baffle that eliminates that electronic delay in favor of proper physical driver placement. Can anyone visualize a CS5.2? As it stands, the cast marble baffle of the CS5 is enormously effective and beautiful. That product is a testament to a time when people of fairly ordinary circumstance could afford a product that still holds its own 35 years on.
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This is fascinating. A history lesson, a reflection on the consequences of decision-making, and a deep repository of product information all in one.
My immediate thought reading this - and please forgive me if it sounds in any way sacrilegious as this is certainly not my intent - would be to yank out the passive crossover, amplify each of the five channels individually, and control the amplifiers via a 10-way active crossover, DSP-enabled speaker management unit, which in addition to crossover duties would allow for precise delay adjustment for each driver / driver pair, and room correction of course. Was anything like this ever envisioned?
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devinplombier - we did explore low level crossovers. Net result is that we knew our niche which was all analogue and purist. Other folks have done versions of what you suggest. We always looked at overall cost effectiveness and separate amps, cables, etc. are not cost effective solutions, in our opinion. Also, the time of the CS5 development was 1988 - early and crude digital performance.Of additional interest may be that the level of control needed for net resultant 6dB/octave slopes over approximately 7 octaves is far from trivial, even with digital modeling. We committed to minimum phase x time aligned performance with the 1978 model 03 and never looked back. Note that one would need to model, in addition to the driver roll-off slopes, the various reactive circuits to cancel resonances as well as the impedance correction shunts to maintain Thiel's resistive (non-reactive) load profiles. Most folks are very surprised how difficult that is with off-the shelf digital filters. The approach we were intrigued by is low-level, active analog circuits before the power amps. In fact one of our first, pre model 01, trial products in 1975 was just such a speaker with 3 built to order amps and custom active crossovers in a 10" 3-way in a large bookshelf format. That product was unfeasible for a new company in a farmhouse. The technical aspects were manageable and indeed prototypes were impressive. But we lacked the stuff for market education and penetration. Indeed, powered speakers never became very popular. To your question: we envisioned a lot. Line sources, spherical globes, di and bi poles. Active equalization was our first market entry and contained enough uniqueness to create more demand than we could meet for the next 30+ years. Cheers, TT
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lars - a few thoughts. I have rather recent acquisitions of both CS5i and CS2.4, but not much actual experience with either of them. I’ll jump to my conclusion first which is that the 2.4 might well suit your needs better due to what may be your fairly small space. The CS5 has individual drivers, which at 8’ don’t integrate their soundfields very well. Also, the primary advantage of larger speakers is to fill larger spaces with deeper bass and higher amplitude. The 5 will do that only if you have the proper amplification to drive them, which as you’ve read here is a very big deal. The 2.4’s upper coax tolerates listening at any distance without compromise. The listener is freed from the triangulation necessary for individual drivers to integrate. Another trajectory is that as Thiel and in particular Jim learned more he developed more sophisticated drivers. The CS5’s only driver from the ground up is the UltraTweeter. The ’i’ designates ’improved’ and adds copper motor shunts to the 3 woofers for significant bass improvement. The Focal lower and MB/quart upper midranges are very good stock drivers having none of Jim’s innovations. I’m saying that the 5 is earlier on Jim’s journey and as such the drivers are more ordinary. But, if you are filling a large space at full amplitude, the 5 puts out much more sound. Unless, of course, you can’t handle the power in your room. There is another aspect that matters a lot to some people, myself included. The CS5 has true sealed bass. The transition from midrange to bass (down to 10Hz) is true first-order phase and time coherent bass. It acts like a real acoustic instrument in your space. The 2.4 is a very well executed reflex bass system using a passive radiator. The transition from the upper bass (woofer) to the lower bass (passive) at 24dB/octave (4th order) introduces a full cycle of delay in the sub bass - more than 20 feet behind the upper bass. That alignment has become acceptable in nearly all speakers, even costing $6 figures. But it is less authentic than first order sealed bass. My studies in audio neurology suggest that the brain builds audio understanding from the bottom up. And therefore inserting the timing discontinuity between deep and mid bass consumes effort to decode and suspend judgement regarding the error. Again, the 2.4 bass is about as good as reflex bass gets, but it’s still reflex bass. The 2.4 is easier to drive than the 5. Reflex bass eliminates current draw in the deep bass because the bottom octave is supplied via tuned mechanical delayed resonance, not a driver motor. A pair of 2.4s might be found at under $1K. And a stellar and affordable upgrade path exists because there is no electronic crossover between the midrange and tweeter. The 5, on the other hand has 4 electronic crossovers, each far more complex than any of the 2.4 circuits because the later 2.4 drivers behave better, needing less correction than those in the 5 / 5i. Tom T
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lars888888, At 8 ft the CS 2.4 is your best choice. It is a steal on the used market and the upgrade path Thiel Renaissance has planned will make this model highly competitive in the 20-25k speaker realm. The two issues, already discussed, that creates problems with the larger Thiels is power (amp) and room (integrating). If you get these right the CS5i will keep a smile on your face. Look at the You Tube CS5i on that site. Look how close they are to the walls and the ceiling. My setup is 10.9' tweeter to tweeter, 3.3' off back wall, 3.6' off side wall, and 6.5' to ceiling. If you feel at any point you may get a larger listening room then I would jump on the CS 5i and hold on to them. As Tom eluded too, improving the 4 electronic crossovers and a handful of other improvements Tom has mentioned in this thread is well worth getting a pair. On an aesthetic note I love the Mid Century modern design that the CS5i embodies more than any other Thiel speaker. When I have the CS 7.2 next to the CS 5i they look short and plump in comparison to the sleek and elegant CS 5i. World class craftsmanship.
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lars888888The CS 2.4 upgrades will be transformative. Binding Post will be replaced with low mass design New internal wiring which is an improvement over the stock, Crossover upgrades with caps developed by Tom Speaker base plinths A few other significant improvements I am noi at liberty to mention yet. I have three pairs of CS 2.4 which I will leave one stock and one with an all out version for others to compare. I like big clean power with Thiels as I've mentioned. Two amps that I favor over all other amps I have used/heard with CS2.4 are Conrad Johnson 350S Premier and Krell MDA-300. Make sure the MDA's were recently serviced/recapped. They bettered the FPB series especially in the bottomed.
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I’ve occasionally thought about trying something like that or, maybe, Path resistors in the coax feed. But I also remember buttoning up the binding post panel after I added dual Cardas binding posts as the culmination to about 3 months of upgrading everything except the drivers and cabinets. That was no small effort. Meanwhile, I remain really happy with my system. Recently heard $80k speakers connected to similar price point electronics and I’m not missing much. In some ways, I actually prefer my rig. Thanks again to Tom Thiel for coaching me during the upgrade! Happy 2025 |
Beetle - our project was good both ways. Thank you for your careful and complete evaluations and reports. Even though we both think that you got seriously upgraded performance, there are actually big gains to be attained with less expenditure. One of these days I hope that you'll try out the next round. I know it's been a long time - but things are coming into focus.
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timm1951 Krell FPB 300cx. Pleaase note I was referring to bottom end between the two. The FPB series are a great pairing with the Thiels especially the hard to drive Thiels. In a perfect world bi amp the Thiels with the MDA on bottom and the FPB for mids and highs. That is not possible of course unless speakers are modified. For my CS5i Im on the lookout for a pair of FPB 750cmx or MDA-500. As I mentioned I clip my Pass XA200.5 with the CS 5i but mated with the CS 7.2 the XA 200.5 produces an engaging experience for the listener. I use the 200.5 for other Thiel speakers under the CS 7.2 with great results. Over kill for the CS 2.4 as you can get a XA 100.5 that will do the job or a Conrad Johnson Premier 350S. It's cheaper on the used market than the XA 100.5 and it is the amp to mate with the CS 2.4 from my experience.
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SCS4 uses the same tweeter as the 2.7’s and would be a great match. MCS1 would be another option to look at. MCS1 is quite large and has two woofers single midrange and tweeter. I think this one would make more of a notable change for your setup.
I own both and between the two I feel the MCS1 provides a larger soundstage for the center channel in my setup. |
@jafant yes, still running Cardas Golden Reference which have been out of production for years now. Bi-wired! That was my final step along with upgrading to Cardas CPB binding posts. That really snapped everything into a beautiful focus, icing on the cake of many fruitful upgrades. OTOH, I also have a Cardas Golden powercord to my amp, and that might be the least cost effective tweak I’ve done. |
@tomthiel Glad to know you’re still working on the upgrades and making them more cost effective. I never bothered to total my parts cost other than I know it was well above $1000 even with some of the discounts you were able to provide on some items. But it was money well spent. I’m unaware of any speaker less than $10k that can touch these. I think I would need to go to at least a Vandy Quatro ($15k last I looked) to be this happy. I have zero regrets and was happy to replace the entirety of my crossovers for reasons you are aware of. Plus, I now have only film caps and should not need to ever re-cap the boards :) |
