Happy Friday! 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!
13,501 responses Add your response
Here's a pair of CS 7s for sale in the Pittsburgh PA area - https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=177758.msg1870519;topicseen#new |
islamey Welcome! Good to see you here from abroad. Thank You for the wonderful introduction as well. You own quite a system built around a sweet pair of CS 3.7 loudspeakers. I look forward in reading more about your Musical tastes. Read through these pages to find other 3.7 members on the Panel. Happy Listening! |
Hallo tomthiel, hallo jafant, brettmcee and dear all! I have been an enthusiastic follower of thiel-owners, in particular since Tom has started to share his amazig kowledge. I live in Vienna / Austria, bought a pair of brand new Thiel CS 3.7 in Dec. 2008 (replacing the also gorgeous Kef 104/2 and Silver Sounds 8-gauge speaker cables), powered by a recently acquired Bryston 4B3 (before by 4BSST3), and connected via Audience 'e' cables (upgradeable towards SE - I am currently thinking about it) and supported by REL S/510 subs with deep crossover setting (ajustable) around 40 Hz - the way Jim Thiel liked it as far as I have heard. All this in my rather spacious scholarly library packed with books et al. - Just in short this time: highly synergetic and really perfect in many aspects - according to my ears (as an acitve participant of piano master classes and performer in the past), in the ears of noted musicians in our music addicted City of Vienna, and enthusiastically confimed by a professional sound engineer. - Now, after such a (too) extensive introduction: allow me pls some special questions: my Thiels SN are 719/720, so according to your infos in the past, TOM: somewhere between the first and the scond revision; they were sent to serve as a demo model on a HiFi fair in Vienna in Nov. 2008 before I bought them, so may be one of those pairs which got special attention? And you also mentioned some delicate ideas for an upgrade ('hot rod') towards the SN 800+ (?) series of the CS 3.7s. BUT: I am a little worried that sh.. can always happen and will happen according to Murphy's law. So, better enjoy what I have and adore or go for even more resp. audible (micro-) improvements? Another worry concerns the sealed little tube taking the internal cable towards the upper closed containing the coax drivers; as you mentioned in one of your former messages, Tom: the silicone sealing might get dry after so many years, and give way for harmful pressure from the woofers below destroying the caox driver? Enough - and more than this for now. Another interest which we might share, Tom is: sound wood, and the genre of biography - one of my academic specialisms... |
@brettmcee Really good post above. I've done and accomplished over a lifetime of hardware and music nearly everything you praise (except reel-to-reel and Schitt, perhaps at my loss). I'm no longer a digiphobe now that *good* digital can be very good, but use it for what is best and get into the analog domain quickly (knowing most vinyl from the past 20-30 years was recorded digitally, often with awful gear by today's standards). Achieving system synergy with the variety of combinations or hardware, room acoustics, and your ears, is the end game. |
Obviously music is initially analogue. Wouldn’t it be best to attempt to reproduce it that way? Digital offers control over time and frequency, but generally speaking, speakers are analogue instruments as well. Unless you go all digital, I would get out of the digital domain as quickly as you can. Sure you could tweak digital to your hearts content, but wouldn’t it just be better to assemble the best all-analogue system you can that makes your favorite music sound the way you want? My personal goal, and I’m very close, is to be able to play any style of music, from any era, on any available medium/format (so far reel to reel tape is the best I’ve found) and to have everything sound the way you expect it to sound or better. I’ve been down the tone control, parametric EQ, digital EQ, DSP road and all you end up doing is tweak and tweak and tweak. Invest in a good DAC (Schiit DACs are great and affordable) and a decent turntable, and enjoy finding synergies in the many designs of speakers, cables, and amplifiers that are affordable and available on the used market. A quiet room. Tubes in your preamp. Powerful solid state amplification and speakers YOU LOVE in the RIGHT PLACE in that room. Everything else is gravy. |
thielrules - I understand the trade-off between linear and minimum plusses and minuses. Regarding the DSP solution, that's a realm that is morphing in real time. Even at the very high end, digitization still brings its own set of potential problems. Digital circuitry is noisy and requires careful isolation from analog. Assuming you can manage all that and get stellar results, there is the matter of different skill sets. Of course in Thiel Audio's day, the realm didn't exist, or was still in its infancy and adolescence. Jim developed his tricks and his niche firmly in the analog sphere, and nurtured and grew those skills over his whole career. I am committed to consolidating that legacy for its stability into the future. I am pleased that you are applying digital solutions to the design, but such an undertaking beyond DIY, would take a concerted effort to make it so. |
Tom, we are not in disagreement. The pre-ringing is only a concern if I use linear filters to reduce the phase differences in the xo range. With digital minimum filters this is no concern but the phase differences are harder to control. I don't get it why dsp does not get more support. It is the easiest way to approach objective transparency and at the same time dial in any frequency or xo characteristic that you may subjectively desire. Instead of experimenting with different cables, amps, or any other hardware, you simply change some settings and switch back and forth to hear the differences. |
@thielrules I'm not sure many of us could differentiate a 'coherent source' Thiel from a 'conventional' speaker with standard A/B testing (blind or not) over the course of an evening. As I related a few months ago, I bought Thiels (2.3 then 2.4) as they checked so many boxes for both design and immediate sonics. Their coherence was mostly an academic advantage to this engineer. It was only after a few months of listening only to a good non-coherent speaker in place of 20 years of Thiels in my familiar acoustics and electronics that reinserting the CS2.4 into my system created a profound psycho-acoustic improvement. @tomthiel OK, I'll accept that, that the ported bass results in a fixed 1-cycle lag from the radiator, hence phase coherence remains intact throughout the speaker's entire bandwidth. And time coherence is only impacted in the lowest frequencies where the passive radiator is most active, below 100Hz in my 2.4 instance. And yes that's a helluva lot better than most other speakers that go through all sorts of phase and timing shifts at each crossover point, as Stereopile plots show, dismissed as 'optimal crossover design' as 'each driver smoothly hands off to the next.' |
thielrules - as I see it, the output of the port is a full cycle behind the output of the upper drivers, with 4th order (24dB/octave) slopes induced by the physical / mechanical interaction of the resonating port (no electronics involved.) Since I think that 4th order slopes maintain phase linearity, the only non-coherence would be in the time domain, where the frequencies covered by the port would emanate one cycle behind (but in phase). My calculation says that lowest tone centered on 38Hz (port peak output) would sound like it comes from 30' behind the speaker.Above 50Hz (the -3dB/half power crosspoint) the output becomes dominated by the woofer which is in-plane and therefore in-time with the upper signal. The lowest note of a bass is about 40Hz, and most of its information is above that 50Hz crosspoint. So, I'm not surprised if many people can't distinguish between ported and sealed bass. Also, your DSP solution that further minimizes slight phase discrepancies in Jim's original analog filters, does introduce a digital conversion as well as some pre-ringing (which you have minimized.) I am one of those folks who is sensitive to pre-ringing, so I might choose different trade-offs than you do. Remember that most modern speakers admit these 360° / full rotation phase shifts at every crossover point, where there is lots of musical information. The common call is that "it can't be heard". I suspect most Thiel fans prefer it not be there, even if their ear-brain is deemed to be able to ignore it. |
It is my understanding that a 360 degree phase rotation has no audible impact. The audible impact of a phase shift is more likely if the drivers interact and deviate from the baseline phase. My measurements of individual thiel drivers show remarkable near zero phase of the main frequency range of each driver but the xo range usually needs work. As the xo range is wide, this is a challenge. I was not able to validate that the cross over filters cause the cancelling out of the opposite phase effects. I don't know if this is a result of variation in the speakers and/or the limited sample size. What I do know is using digital linear filters is able to come close to the ideal and maintain near zero phase in the xo range and if carefully designed can keep any pre-ringing to a minimum. Comparing the near zero phase speaker with the variable phase speaker seems a subtle audible difference at best. |
sdecker - I appreciate your feedback. Remember that I did not keep up with Thiel for its last 15 years. I agree "completely time and phase coherent" is a marketing, rather than an engineering term, so it would have come through Kathy's channel. Fair point. On the other hand, excepting that stuff in the bass, those speakers are phase coherent. What I mean by the "phase shift problem evaporating" is not clear to me either. My measurements show group delay remaining constant through that 33 to 100Hz range, and I don't have a handle on what frequency the full rotation occurs to cause the lower fundamental to be be behind the upper range. I'm not being coy, I'm admitting my limited knowledge of the particulars. I do believe the effect is audible, if we compared your 2.4 to a CS5. So much to learn, so little time. Please educate us if you learn more from the Asylum or other study. |
@tomtheil Not to put too fine a point on it [although it seems I did!], but I have most of the hardcopy 'glossy' marketing brochures for 2.3, 2.4 and the 2000s entire Thiel line. The 2.4SE brochure's lead headline under "Features and Benefits" is "Completely Time and Phase Coherent" and repeats that in the text. A text printout of the CS2.3 web page states "As with other THIEL speakers, the CS2.3 achieves complete time and phase accuracy for very realistic ...". The CS2.4 brochure in the center section of bulleted features "Completely time and phase coherent for greater realism" and repeats the same sentence in the headline of the text that repeats it again and its benefits. A four page glossy full-line brochure from 1/2011 makes the same statement at the top of their bulleted features, as does the CS2.4 "New Product Press Release." So perhaps the marketing folks took liberties that Jim would not have approved of personally and technically? I'm uncertain what you mean by the "phase shift problem evaporates" when the "bass extends below the program limit." What is the 'program limit'? There's essentially no 'real' bass below my 2.4 passband of 33Hz. It's the range between 33 and 100Hz that the radiator is fully active that it seems there is the phase shift. Please don't anyone take this as a critique, only critical thinking. Just in the last few days I've reconfirmed how the relaxed and lifelike presentation of my 2.4 exceed all the lesser benefits of my recent KEF LS50 Meta purchase, and put them back into the big rig indefinitely. |
sdecker - I am not fluent enough in the art to answer much about the nuances of Thiel's phase coherence. I will point out that your "completely time and phase coherent" is not something that Thiel claimed. The applicable term of art is "minimum phase transducer", which has a complex set of definitions revolving around the least phase error possible given the particulars of the design parameters. To a prior question of whether this is marketing-speak, I say it is not. Jim was extremely careful to not claim anything beyond the real, hard facts. I must demure to more knowledgeable folks regarding bass reflex phase error. Please let us know what you learn from your studies, The Asylum, etc. Here is something I do know. If the bass extends below the program limit, much of the phase shift problem evaporates. All Thiel models push that lower limit quite deep. Note also that Thiel's bass tunings typically produce low and controlled impedance peaks with phase plot following closely and well, indicating significant attention paid to coherence at all frequencies. As you know, I am a fan of sealed bass, and I have shared here how disappointed Jim was that his equalized bass solution did not meet better market acceptance. I speculate that a more purist EQ execution, along with true balanced design, and today's better interconnects - that an equalized sealed-box bass might be viable. Just for fun, you all might enjoy reading about Thiel's first product the 01. It is an equalized 10" 2-way with bass to 30Hz with third order slopes which are phase correct in many ways, excluding polar dispersion, in a 1.2 cubic foot enclosure at 94dB efficiency. That product got us to Germany by 1978 and via Europe got the attention of advante-garde American dealers. I have seen no evidence of audiophile interest in the 01, but it most clearly represents Jim's initial design impulses and orientation. |
Tweak - in a first order alignment, neither driver rotates more than 90° phase shift, and the overlapping drivers are in opposite directions - they sum to zero. But that's only if each driver, in its enclosure rolls off at 6dB / octave. All that 'extra stuff' in Jim's crossovers is to counteract any anomalies in the entire system such that they do just that. Then they cancel each other and sum to zero phase shift. Since the world is never perfect, plus/minus 10% is achieved, except for the CS5 @ 5%. Convention allows these claims for 100Hz and up. We'll talk about bass later. |
Personally I dont see how phase angles of any 2 overlapping drivers could ever be a perfect overlay. Maybe at a few frequencies but certainly not 90%. Wishful thinking and I certainly want to learn more. Not so sure that adding corrective filters are the best way to fly. Adding more and more parts sucks up power and will add noise and reduce dynamics. Tom |
yyzsantabarbara Thank You for the extra follow up regarding music server/streamer progress. We have a few members on the Panel who are into computer audio applications. On the flipside, my physical copy of the 5-CD set arrives next week. I am looking forward in hearing this Album remixed plus all of the session out-takes. Happy Listening! |
A couple of things of interest with my Thiel CS3.7. My problems with George Harrisons ATMP was due to me having my music server on a PowerLine network which is attached to my Ethernet network. This was fine for a long time but some things have changed and I got caught by lack of bandwidth when streaming ATMP. I moved my music server to a MacMini that is now directly on the Ethernet network and the ATMP issue is gone. It sounds perfect. I sold my headphone amp and have the new LSA Voyager 350 GAN amp in to replace it. However, I also have it hooked up to my Thiels and I think this is going to be a winning combo. It costs $3000 and it seems like a great match for the 3.7. I will post again after I have over 100 hours on the amp. |
I was following with interest the thread a couple weeks ago about how Thiel's moving from sealed to radiator/ported woofers threw off the low-frequency phase coherency by 360 degrees. How does this make for a "coherent phase" loudspeaker if so much of the frequency range isn't aligned at all? Stereopile always makes frequency response measurements of port vs woofer. My 2.4 shows that above 100Hz, the radiator's output is 15-20dB below the woofer. So if I'm playing music with no bass content below 100Hz, do I have a reasonably coherent phase speaker? And as all Thiels were no longer sealed after the late-90s, why do their spec sheets state "Phase Response: +-10 degrees"?? (or 5 deg with 2.3 & 2.4) Given Thiel's comprehensive tech data, why is this so vague? As it states no frequency, is it unspoken that this is only valid above the woofer's passband? The clean-decay step response plots suggest at least the 'time' coherency to be true. My 2.4 brochure states "Completely Time and Phase Coherent." Then it states the 'time' portion is from the slanted baffle and the 'phase' portion is the first-order slopes *between the drivers* -- is this to suggest that what happens outside the XO, ie the bass loading, is 'outside' a driver rather than 'between' drivers?? And therefore low frequencies are inapplicable to the "complete" phase coherence and +-5* spec? That seems very un-Thiel-like, and I'm sure someone long before me would ask that question! I'm sure someone on this thread has the necessary acoustics (or marketing-speak) background to offer insight here. All my pre-Thiel speakers were sealed so I'm finding this, uh, interesting... |
I also have problems with a not ideal living room right now with lack of width.My speakers are 7 feet apart instead of the ideal 8 feet.Soundstage is not bad at all if speakers are firering straight out.In a couple of months i'm moving in a new home and should have a bigger living room but will have to do long wall placement this time around because the width is only 13,6 feet. |
@thieliste yes, I am likely missing out on bass reinforcement but with a tradeoff of optimized imaging. My system is in the living room, so am constrained to keep it usable as such. I do get some energy down to the 30 Hz rating and it drops off steeply from there and did my CS1.6 at 50 Hz. With the 1.6s I played around more with placements closer to the front wall but it didn’t appreciably help bass impact while clearly hurting imaging. Lots of tradeoffs in this hobby and few “best” solutions. But I remain *super* happy with my Ayre + Thiel system and do not foresee any further upgrades. |
My 2.4 are 6' from the back wall and either side wall, 8' apart, 9' to the ideal listening position, and have a smidge of toe, <10 degrees. While they're 6' to the 'real' back wall, they're 3' to 'interruptions' like an open stairwell and my stereo rack. The room is an open floor plan to other 'attached' rooms, 8' ceiling, thick pile rug. So overall very good acoustics for Thiels, with no reflective boundaries anywhere nearby. But it does create a lumpy low bass room response below about 80Hz. Indeed, 25Hz is the same 0dB reference level as 1kHz. This was 'reinforced' when I recently bought KEF LS50 Metas, whose output drops steeply below 80Hz. So in many ways their bass is smoother in my room as the low bass is MIA and not exciting the room nodes. Luckily, a lot of music has little or no bass below 100Hz. |
@thielrules Thanks for the effort to test and respond. I should have posted this here instead of the ALL THINGS MUST PASS thread. I played the track that was causing the problem more than 10x to investgate. It sounded the worst on my Thiel and not so bad on the RAAL SR1a headphones or LS50 speakers. Though on the RAAL and LS50 is sounded a little off. The next day (today) I listened to the album again on my Thiel CS3.7 and this time there was no distortion on HEAR ME LORD when the humming parts come up. It was likely a streaming hiccup when the problems came up. I listened a few times today and each time it was perfect. It would have been a real irritation if my 8 month old new COAX drivers needed a second replacement. |
@vair68robert No capacitance, resistance, or inductance values were changed intentionally although my LCR meter measured some small deviations from the target values. That said, OEM caps were mostly 100V whereas the new caps range 160-630V. OEM resistors were 10W, Mills are 12W. I think one, if not both, foil coils in the feed positions were rated different AWG than OEM air cores. And the FST hookup wire appeared to be 18 gauge throughout whereas the Cardas replacements were various combinations of 18 and 15 gauge depending on in/out and coax/woofer. Tom Thiel cautioned me to check total resistance of the boards. I did not do this before replacing the sandcast resistors but one copy of the layout I have indicates total resistance of the 2.4 coax filter should be, IIRC, 31.6 Ohms and the woofer filter is nearly a flow through. My LCR meter measured resistance, of the final boards, within 0.1 Ohms of those values. |
This probably isn't relevant, but years ago I had Thiel 3.6's driven by Muse model 175 monoblocks. On one particular CD, a Chandos recording of Martinu piano sonatas, there was a short passage that always seemed to excite one of the tweeters, causing a clipping-like distortion (amps were far from overdriven). No other music caused this, and the same passage on the same CD played on several other systems caused no problems. The exact reason was never discovered. I moved on to Proac Response 2.5's. |
tomthiel: Do the screws to the passive radiators of the 3.6’s need to be tight? I checked all the screws to the midrange and tweeter (a couple needed a 1/16 of a turn or so) but the radiator screws had quite a bit of play. Just wondering if they are for position adjustment or for coupling to the baffle. Thanks, |
