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!
jafant

hifi28 - good memory, with of course, a back-story for fun.

The crossover modification is at SN4901, May 1987, two years in. I don’t remember the exact change - I have only the revised layout from which I have derived the schematic. But I do remember the back-story.

Let’s start with the end: the modification was very slight, making a change in the roll-out of the upper midrange. Generally Jim revisited designs to tweak crossovers to accommodate driver tendencies and burn-in factors that become apparent as time passes. Or if a driver gets a production change (such as adhesive, etc.), slight engineering updates may correct it. The CS2 was uniquely a completely stable product, having no such driver changes and requiring no real tweaks. Jim was pleased that he had gotten it right the first time out.

Enter Larry Archibald, the fairly new publisher of Stereophile Magazine. Larry was supportive of our products, but always had the last word. He had written critically about the CS2’s upper midrange ’edge’ in various ways. It turned out, learned behind the curtain, that all of his listening to the CS2 had been without their (required) grilles because "he doesn’t listen with grilles". On a second round of review by one of his staff, Larry heard the CS2 with grilles and declared that "the problem had been fixed". Now enter Kathy Gornik, our co-founding marketing director whose job included press and public relations. Being an essentially political animal, she deemed fit to give Larry an ’out’ - by Jim ’fixing’ the crossover that Larry could point to as the remedy. Jim’s desire to have a product that needed no changes through its life took back seat to Kathy giving Larry permission to praise the upgraded performance without losing any face.

I don’t know whether it would be possible to reconstruct who did what when, the exact change and so forth. I do not remember changing our archived CS2 reference samples.

Bottom line: a small crossover change was made at serial number 4901 as well as adding the viscous rubber strips to mechanically unify the grille with the baffle. If anyone has access to an early CS2 and wants to send an XO photo noting component values, I’ll be glad to document the change. If anyone updates their CS2 crossovers, I’ll use the revised values. But the big deal is to use the grilles which include a tweeter wave guide and full baffle diffraction control which considerably upgrade performance.

@tomthiel

 

I don’t like the bright drivers either. Since they are anodized, any color would have been possible. My choice would have been charcoal to dark bronze with bronze hardware instead of gold. Maybe next time around . . .

 

In the category of "audiophiles think of the craziest things..."

I’ve sometimes wondered how possible it would be to alter the color of a speaker driver. As an example, take the white woofer of the 2.7 or the aluminum midrange.

What would happen if you lightly spray painted them black or something? What, if any, sonic cost might be incurred? My intuition is that if it’s going to alter the sound it would do so more with the upper drivers (mid/tweeter) vs woofers.

Anyone looking for a pair of 2.3 coaxial drivers? I wish these were new/old stock 3.6 tweeters. I’d like to buy and compare unused aluminum tweeters with my new replacement soft dome tweeters.

https://www.audiogon.com/listings/lisai53b-thiel-cs-2-3-full-range

prof - black paint is typically carbon pigment, which is light-weight as pigments go.

The issue would be added mass proportional to the extant moving mass. I suspect that in a woofer or midrange, the added mass would be functionally inconsequential, but in a tweeter it might matter.

I'm interested enough to try a light misting coat on my CS1.6 woofers. I can sweep before and after and compare output including all harmonics and time domain performance.

I'll use lacquer so I can wipe it off if necessary.