220 watts at 4 ohms litterally says approved for 2 ohm loads continuous on the amp. Even has speaker protection.
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!
13,687 responses Add your response
thoft, I've matched the Forte' 3 with Thiel CS 2's a couple of times for different friends. A very nice match. But, the CS 2's are 6 Ohm nominal / 5 Ohm minimum load. I wouldn't match the Forte' with the 3.6's impedance load. Furthermore, there is some question as to whether or not there are still IGBT devices, used in some Forte's, available should they need service. Nelson designed the early Forte' stuff, the later Forte's were designed by Bladelius, et al. BTW, I seem to recall that the Palladium's quickly give up Class A bias when presented with sub 8 Ohm loads. Despite being optimistic when they where released, I remember being quite disappointed when auditioning them. |
So, Nelson seems to doubt the forte’s ability to drive the 3.6 more than the adcom’s oddly. So I decided to risk it. https://youtu.be/X540Levd5nU I don’t think the bass is as dynamic as it could be as it would be with other amps of higher quality. |
I wanted to share my experiences in the past few weeks with using Townshend Super Tweeters on my 3.5s. I have deleted my earlier post on this as it was published in the middle of a deep conversation on amps and I think it must have flown over everyone’s radar. Therefore I am reposting it as I do think my findings are worthy of note for Thiel Owners, and actually anyone with great speakers...
and I’d be very interested to hear of other Thiel owner thoughts on/experiences with super tweeters.
Given that Max Townshend developed these around Quad ESL 57s, I actually bought these first and foremost to accompany my own 57s. While they are highly impressive in that application, I have to report that they actually make a much bigger difference with my 3.5s. The effects of these super tweeters are far more wide ranging than just improving the top end, which they do incredibly well. They actually benefit the entire audible spectrum and provide much greater clarity, definition and musicality right down into the deep bass. Soundstage improves in all dimensions. Images occupy far more palpable spaces and it’s the sort of upgrade that has you listening late into the night to hear elements of your music collection rendered better than ever in the context of your own system. The super tweeters have multiple gain settings to allow a lot of adjustment to best fit the system/room. It’s pretty easy to dial them in and find a beautiful sweet spot position. They are quite small and fit perfectly on the veneered top section of the speakers. Rather than changing the sonic character of the 3.5s, they seem to make it even more obvious and my own feelings are that these wonderful creations by Jim now sound in a different, much higher class. The UK-made super tweeters can be imported direct from Townshend via Audiogon and I can vouch that Townshend’s service is first class. They even offer a money back deal, but that’s easy to do as I struggle to imagine anyone ever sends these back after trialing them. They certainly aren’t cheap, but the overall effects more than justify the investment. It seems that every subtle nuance is improved. Yes I think they are that good. They still seem to be running in and progressively improving even further, which can be most easily heard in ever more convincing timbre and astounding extra detail retrieval. Not sure if Tom’s plans include adding a super tweeter to his 3.5 tweaks, but here’s a no brainer upgrade you can try for yourself right now. Highest recommendation. A great addition after you’ve first added dual subs. I think you’ll love your Thiels even more. I know I do, and I didn’t think that was possible. |
3rd - Rob Gillum is the man! He rebuilt my CS2.3 mid/highs in 2017. Now they 1) sound better than new especially the 3D soundstage, 2) are cured of any slight aggressiveness that Thiels may be criticised for and 3) were perfect straight out of the box with no running in required. I have auditioned several current $10,000 speakers and none of them come close to my Thiels. He can surely work magic on the woofers. |
Is there a known replacement for the 2.2 8" woofer? Are any still available? There is a pair of 2.2's for sale locally at a ridiculous price with one woofer likely blown. Alternately - is rebuilding the woofer an option? I won't be giving up my 3.5's but at the price offered I'm thinking of getting them for a relative or friend - or just to have around for fun |
Tom Thiel The metal and its shape is more reactive to vibration. In this case the reactive material will dissipate the vibrational energy because of the bearing motion. The steel bearing can also be another barrier to RFI penetration along with any other metal barrier that may already exist around the conductor. Back to the whole shear velocity thing. In this case you don't want even smaller more densely packed particles that have very slow velocities because they could or will over damp the copper or silver wire. As I wrote earlier with the same material and shape the smallest material that could be more densely packed did not sound as good as it's larger brother of the same shape which is less densely packed. Any single material boundary can swamp and overwhelm the sound of another material and its boundary.. From the International Atomic Energy Agency below. I found this years ago and forgot and found it again recently. I want to post this on other threads as it will describe how particle waves react with each other and their material boundaries. https://www.ndt.net/forum/files/ut--.pdf Look to pages 38 to 41 or so. What is described is how and what we hear and how different materials and shapes sound the way they do. I want to thank a lady Debbie Miles, a seismologist for 40 years, she has greatly influenced my venture into how materials and shapes interact and their influence on what we hear.. Tom |
Tom Thiel.. About the Sonoran wire from Starsound..this product line has been made since the early 90's and has never had any relationship with MIT. As with all our products the Audio Points and Sistrum family of audio racks and platforms.. and most of the cables... we have designed in methods for resonance control and mechanical grounding. We know from years of listening experience that any mechanical conductor such as a listening room a speaker cabinet a stand and any type of electrical conductor can be altered by vibration and resonance. We have learned from previous works that if you overdamp a product that you eat into the spectrum that suggests that you are listening to a live event. There is a fine line in keeping it real. Even a signal wire can be over controlled and we accrued many hours listening to the same wire again and again surrounded by different materials and geometric shapes even in the same family of elements. While we thought that a container of steel bearings 5 million per pound would sound the best around our conductor we instead sonically chose surrounding the conductor with the same material and geometry but one which had a part count of 970,000 bearings per pound. And no I didn't make a part count myself. Even the conductor can be damped to sonic detriment. Same with speaker stands. No to sand or lead shot as those materials have a very low shear velocity and will overdamp the device. Even with the steel shot we usually suggest filling a post 1/2 to 2/3's..As you add more you suddenly hear too much darkness and then the sound stage begins to shut down. Darkness and virtually no light. Not that. Recently I have been experimenting with materials and coatings that can be easily applied to many different shapes and surfaces. They control shear induced resonance which travels on and thru any solid material. I have applied this same material to an active room device that greatly enhances laminar flow and reduces the impression of room boundaries. Listening in wide open space. Tom |
prof I don't endorse any. In most realistic use cases there would be no need to pay extra money for silver cables. Silver is a teeny bit more conductive than copper, but even that can be made up by a higher awg copper wire. And in most non-extreme cases (e.g. crazy long cable runs) it's not hard at all to choose a copper wire of sufficient awg and characteristics to work just fine. Properly used, there is no inherent "characteristics" of "silver wire" that changes the frequency balance vs copper, such as to actually thin out the sound (e.g. by attenuating frequencies in the warmth range - e.g 60 to 250Hz or lower mid 250 to 500Hz range). It's a psychological thing. We know silver is visually "bright" so audiophiles imagined "sounds bright," this became an audiophile meme, and so now there's the "silver sounds bright" or "thin" concept among audiophiles. Silver coated cables may extend the life of some cables, but that's about it - it's not going to change the sound in proper use cases. |
JAFant - jazz is great all around for its layers of nuance. And there's a lot of well-made jazz out there. I landed on my wide rather than deep approach to sources partly as a contrast to the usual way. Thiel, and most others I knew at the time, used favorite tracks, known to be well made, thereby minimizing the variable of aural input "noise". I call that deep as in drilling farther and further into the subtleties of that track. But, what if those pristine tracks didn't stimulate the "sizzle / tinsel ", etc. Whatever the cause, a problem could be dismissed as a "bad recording". But what if (as I now suspect) some of those "bad recordings" might just be exacerbating shortcomings in the speaker. This territory is where most of my detective work is happening. |
Prof - I would love your feedback regarding their sound, when the time comes. I'll say that the more that I improve the technical performance and address the shortcomings caused by our naivete in 1976, the less they sound like Thiel 02s, and the more they sound like more recent Thiels. And it's not simply that better is better. |
Prof - for my explorations of imagination I use the 02 as a path not taken. An entire business could have been built on developing and enriching that simple two way box. My unambiguous progress is in the realm of the acousto-mechanical: grille and baffle treatment, port mechanics, cabinet bracing, etc. Enter electro-magnetics and tings get much murkier for me. In the XO, my straightforward progress has been separating the XO halves and moving away from the driver. The drivers themselves represent middle ground. Substituting a modern Thiel (CS.5) woofer removes the normal distortions of normal drivers. Similarly, higher grade caps and resistors certainly solve more than they confuse. But the realm of wire is truly deep stuff. I have ruled out silver entire or plated. Entirely silver is unaffordable; plating introduces problems, both audible and measurable. I suspect you would enjoy finding someone who really knows wire. The guy in charge of Belden's normal wire has created a high-end entry. It looks a lot like the Kimber stuff that blew our minds in the early 80s. (At $1,000 / pair foot in the day) it broke down our mental barriers to how wire can matter. I don't know enough. Wire experiments are cumbersome, tedious and expensive. I have migrated to using the 02 with a CS.5 woofer (very linear full range) with no crossover and 4 sets of inputs connected to 4 lengths x 1 foot long, all wired to the driver. Each input pair is fed by equal lengths of Straightwire star quad Octave II. One cable twisted pair per input pair. A second speaker stretches my test samples to 8 pairs. A second speaker stretches my test samples to 8 pairs. I compare the 4 variants in one speaker and then run a FuzzMeasure sweep, which shows distinct (albeit small) differences. No test is perfect, but this one is fairly streamlined. Wire differences, both audible and measured, are definite and have become instructive. But, far from definitive yet. More study required as the academics say. By the way, guys, I'm looking for a few pairs of 02s to hotrod. |
At Starsound we have our wire in our speakers that is surrounded by a double jacket. Between the void of the 2 jackets we fill with our Micro Bearing Steel. The bearing acts as a shield and as a reactive resonance control system. The bearing dissapates vibration before it contacts the conductor. Tom |
tmsrdg - I don't have a track. My MO is to play more music rather than concentrating on a single cut. So, I skip through the disc to find passages that do whatever I need to do. I will say that disc one is more obnoxious, disc 2 is the best, and the disc 3 out-takes are variable.If I had to choose, I would choose disc 1 as most likely to misbehave. I hope that gives you somewhere to begin. |
As I mentioned, I don't have 3.7s. If I were testing them, I would find some music and/or test signal that reliably produce the problem. I would use a stethoscope to reliably hear it. I would then mount felt and test, then add UltraSuede and test. Etc. The process is slow and deliberate. There is room for other input such as internal wire rattling, etc. I saw a video that showed the driver wires fed through silicone tubing. Perhaps that's a culprit. It is interesting that more than one person has heard something similar. I don't know the answer, but I do register your experience. |
"
Cascadesphil - my working hypothesis is that dry air and moist air couple and resolve the various forces differently - not a theory, but a hunch developed over the past year of experimentation." Tom - thanks. I sort of figured it could be something like that. After one session, where I had some issues, I actually grabbed my allen wrench to make sure the drivers were tight and they were. For a bit it drove me a little crazy (and some would say that's not a far drive) and I went back to the video on how the 3.7s were made and was thinking about looking inside. Then when I played the same stuff where I didn't notice a problem. Back in early March of 2020, I had my AC units tuned up (as I usually do annually and I have two zones, one for a large bonus room upstairs and I go upstairs about once or so a week to move dust around and flush the toilet). Bacteria gets attached to the area around the coils and they get cleaned with either wipes or Lysol. I decided to put in the Patriot UV light (https://www.patriotiaq.com/#!/Patriot_UV) on the main zone (and my bedroom and the living area I use is on the main zone) at the time of the tune up. Since then, I began to notice (don't know if it is coincidence) a couple of things. I've been sleeping a drop better. Also, I began to notice (at least a bit more) those anomalies with the 3.7s. I probably noticed them before that but to me it seemed less that I chalked it up to perhaps my ears were dirty (I go to the ENT on average about every 10 months as my ear canals build up wax) at the time. |
Prof - I want to thank you personally for cheering the 02s awhile back. Your enthusiasm caused me to get a few pairs which are now my primary workhorses for comparing solutions and making sense of upgrade package choices. The stock 02 is surprisingly good. Plus, it is readily upgradeable via braced cabinets, XO components, etc. and the application of the laminar-launch baffles and work in process of the new port fluid-flow technologies. I recommend all of you find some. We'll have both DIY and home-based upgrade packages sometime this year. I have some as Christmas presents with stock drivers and crossovers, with modified baffles and grilles. What a treat to give, And BTW, they shine compared against some current market darlings. |
You guys are on to something. I got a pair of 3.6s about 1.5 years ago and discovered the phenomenon you all are addressing. It barely, if at all, exists on the CS2.2 or 3.5, of great familiarity to me, and subsequently not very present on the CS1.5, 1.6, PowerPoint or 02. I have spent weeks, spread over months, learning about "tinsel", which I called "sizzle". My observations are anecdotal, but quite thoroughly studied and addressed. This sizzle has led me down a rabbit hole into a warren. I have teamed up with Douglas Pauley who has newly patented a technology to manage turbulent fluid flow - in this case air coupling to the room. Big story there, more later. The sizzle problem revolves around the comparatively large flat area above the 3.6 tweeter, where the 3.5, for example, has none. With a manual or electronic stethoscope, I can hear the problem distinctly as sonic eddies skittling around that surface. One contributor is the mid-tweeter both driving the same frequencies from different physical positions and geometries. I can stimulate the sizzle most readily with female vocal. Yesterday I hung out all day with the Rhino collection of The Trio - Parton, Harris and Rondstadt. The 3.6s are at the north end of the room with the PowerPoints in the southeast corner and my 02 under development on a corner baffle in the same southeast corner. I switch speakers with knife switches to audition same cut, same equipment, same room at same time from the same listening position. The 3.6s are the worst offender by far. Cascadesphil - my working hypothesis is that dry air and moist air couple and resolve the various forces differently - not a theory, but a hunch developed over the past year of experimentation. Grille cloth helps a little, but not much. My best solution has been pruned from bunches of ideas and materials, landing on UltraFine UltraSuede on F11 wool felt on the entire baffle. I haven't developed a meaningful measurement scheme, and such may be beyond my resources. I know through study that we're in esoteric territory. Another factor in play is the turbulent waveform launch from the drivers. Various technologies applied to driver bezels and faceplates aid in transforming that very turbulent launch flow into more laminar flow. Substantive improvements there. There's much more to share, and I'll have some news to report very soon. |
"
Just some occasional "tinsel" in the sound that you have to be up close and at a slight angle to really hear." I've heard that in some instances from one of my 3.7s (and from the listening position). Then I don't hear similar stuff for a couple of months. Sometimes, I've gone back and played what I thought were the same cuts and heard nothing. |
@solobone22 -- If you listen off to the side and rather close to the tweeter you can hear crackling on music with strong lower treble upper mid energy - like timpani for classical music. If you listen out front you can't hear it at all at any volume.I hate to say it, but I've discovered exactly the same issue with one of my 3.7 speakers. It happens most audibly with solo piano music. Just some occasional "tinsel" in the sound that you have to be up close and at a slight angle to really hear. But sometimes it's audible from farther away. I wish this was not happening and I'm not sure what I blown tweeter would really sound like. I mean, I played in a rock band as a kid. Now, we blew speakers. What I'm hearing is nothing like that. |
Too clinical, dry and thin to my ears. Silver cables will present this way on Thiel loudspeakers, especially, the newer models. Sigh. It's worth pointing out occasionally that there is no actual basis for such a claim, beyond imagination. Audiophiles misleading audiophiles.... Anyway, back to Thiels... |
@therealpupalei what do you think of the PS amp? I have a Denon HTR and have hooked it up to my Krell to Thiel setup. This wasn't a good match at all. The preamp I use now (Levinson 326S) is significantly more expensive however is an excellent match for the system. I've also used the Mytek Brooklyn as preamp/DAC and the MSB Analog as preamp/DAC. The Levinson gives it more weight with more meat on the bones without interfering with what the 3.6's do so well. |
@solobone22 Yeah, tbh I was just ready. I could have put more effort in, but I got about a third of the money back for it that I spent on it 20 years ago. It had a good run. Hopefully "they" will fix it up and someone will get some joy out of it. I don’t know about shorting out the XLR input, and will look into it. I am getting a little hum through my current system when I connect my PC through HDMI. So far, unplugging the PC’s HDMI cable does the trick and the amp goes dead silent. |
