Thiel Owners

unsound - you are right. Measurement distance of 50" and closer earlier in time, does not allow the proper triangulation for the drivers' travel path. 8' was Thiel's stated minimum. The limit was Stereophile's set up, but the results looks like speaker design failures. The closer the drivers to each other and the lower the crosspoints, the less the incorrect distance matters. But it does mislead the reading public. Andy makes a proper point that lower crosspoints give the upper driver a much harder time, requiring long excursions and sophisticated cooling.
To the point of Seas, Vifa etc. could do "it". We tried for years without success working with the best. It's not so easy as it might appear. And if someone did, the wire routing factors, etc. are so precise that high failure rates can occur and then who points fingers at whom. Taking it in-house was a huge challenge for us, but it was the only way we could get what we decided we needed.

Coincident drivers solve the lobing problem between the upper concentric drivers and the woofer crossover is at such long wavelengths that its lobing is not very consequental. Sit with your ears at 3' and back at least 8' and you are in the design target.

This discussion makes me feel nostalgic of the younger years.  Oh well time has to move on.  

@tomthiel Thanks for the counter narrative on the TAD reference speakers. Very interesting.

The Hales line was perhaps(?) another example of a faux coherent speaker line. Their cabinets featured concrete baffles that were sloped similarly to Thiel's. I auditioned a pair at the other audiophile store in town before deciding to buy my 2.2s. When I told the salesman I was impressed with Thiel speakers, he brought out the Hales, pointed out the sloped design, and told me they were like Thiel speakers except the concrete baffles made them better. They completely lacked the realism that sold me on the 2.2s, so I moved on.

Maybe it was the salesman more than Hales that misrepresented them as being similar to Thiels –– I never bothered to look at the Hales sales literature. Apparently, Hales used a sealed cabinet for tighter bass and touted flat frequency response as their main selling point. They used fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley crossover networks.

There's a (mostly) enthusiastic thread on Hales speakers here: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/hales-design-group-speakers-how-good-were-they. But it's much shorter than this thread; so there!

ish_mail,

As I've mentioned somewhere earlier on the thread, I owned the Hales Transcendence 5 speakers, and still own a the Hales Transcendence 1 monitors and center channel, which do duty in my home theater and for occasional music listening.  In fact, I own an extra double of each of those speakers just in case I blow a driver, which tells you I'm quite a fan.

The Hales speakers, to my ears, are excellent for midrange/tweeter coherence, smoothness, timbral warmth and accuracy, with a very low sense of "grain" to the sound, and really spectacular soundstaging.

What they miss for me is the density and solidity of the Thiel sound and imaging, and the sense of texture I hear from the Thiels.  (Hales sounding just a tad smoothed over).

But I absolutely adore the Hales in home theater duty because they combined clarity, timbral warmth and transient precision, with a very relaxed presentation.  Good for me since I often come to movie viewing in my home theater after a long day of doing sound effects, so I don't really want to be beaten around by an aggressively dynamic sound. 

Just an FYI:
3.5 Electronic Bass Equalizer listed on Goodwill auction site, current price $16

https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Item/59297127