Thiel Owners

JA - are you suggesting that I'm approaching middle age?

tomthiel

Absolutely! Middle age is the new Fountain of Youth.

Happy Listening!

@thieliste - just wondering if you might have needed the GAIA 1’s instead of the GAIA 2’s? I messaged Isoacoustics about them for my CS3.6’s which weigh about 108 pounds and told them that I was considering putting 3 of the GAIA 1’s (which are rated for 220 pounds for 4 feet) and they said that the 1’s would be the way to go because it is best to keep well under the max rating.

Now I have not done this yet but this tweak to my Sound Anchors stands is something I am still planning on doing in the near future in order to tighten up the bass. I’m thinking that a lot of my bass power is escaping into the suspended floor anyway so by decreasing this, I’m hoping for increased bass clarity. If it turns out that the low bass is too thin, maybe then I will start looking into a sub to go with the 3.6’s.

@masi61  CS 3.7s weight is about 42kg so no problems with the GAIA 2s.

GAIA 1s are for the bigger CS 7.2s.

I did find the bass way to thin for my taste with the GAIA 2s and therefore removed them.

I don't plan on using any Subs at the moment.

Bass is hard to get right, especially as the task is to translate the producers' projections onto our playback reality with a break in psycho-acoustic continuity. In other words, our 'ear-brain' knows our playback environment, but not the performance environment nor the producers' second guesses about our playback space. Over time, bass balance in production has gravitated toward a standard - in loudspeakers less so. There exist many products with strategically underdamped bass creating a big, loose hump in the upper bass. Think British monitors. Thiel's bass balance target was flat assuming only a floor under the speaker which neither added nor subtracted bass content. Any other assumptions are bound to be wrong because playback environments vary drastically and unpredictably.

Jim's design tools utilized free-air (hanging in a tree or later from a tight-rope) with the mic either 3 meters out or on the ground at various speaker heights. These free-field measurements were integrated with ground-plane measurements where the speaker was placed in the middle of a large, heavy truck grade asphalt parking lot (empty, after hours). Ground plane mic placed at 2, 3 and 4 meters out to average boundary conditions. Anechoic (free-air) measurements exhibit a -2dB shelf below 200Hz which comes up to flat in half-space - on a floor. The further room gain added by room reflections and resonances are matters of set-up and preference. 

The SmartSubwoofers addressed those boundary effects with corrective circuitry.

There is a family of considerations for high frequency balance that I'll save for another time. Over the decades, criticism of Thiel speakers has been toward too-lean bass (rather than vice-versa), and popular opinion sometimes favors speakers with objectively heavy bass. Bass balance is a hard question because so much depends on the installation particulars and user preferences. My intent here is to say that Jim assumed nothing about structural reinforcement or subtraction of the bass in the playback space, leaving that to the end user. I haven't found a floor interface product that honors all the factors of that interaction. Jim's working assumption was to leave that set of interactions null. His speakers state his interpretation of correct on an imaginary, neutral floor.