holco
Very cool and interesting project. Good to read about another CS 2.4 loudspeaker owner. Please feel free to join us over on the Thiel Owners thread here at Audiogon. Happy Listening!
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After much research and consideration, Tom Thiel has settled on Clarity CSAs for the upgrade.I think the decision probably comes down to cost/performance ratio. If you were to do the upgrading yourself, I would highly recommend something like Mundorf Supreme or some of Jantzen high end caps. He even has a custom low voltage version to replace the electrolytics. My guess is the electrolytics caps are in the shunt signal path so it may not be critical. Also, they tend to be of very high value (like 50uf or 100uf higher). So it may be expensive to replace them with poly cap. For example, a 100uf Clarity CSA cap is about $100 dollars. |
The original CS2.4, as best as I can tell, had 13uF + 1uF and 27uF + 1uF in the tweeter feed I have not seen the xover in person myself (though hopefully soon), but does anyone know which one is in series and which is in shunt? The caps in series make a lot more difference in sound quality. It may not be worth it to upgrade the one in shunt since the improvement is minimal. |
More pictures, The picture of the xover seems to show the binding posts are at the bottom of the cabinet. As far as I know, all Thiel CS2.4s have the binding posts at the back of the cabinet. |
@andy2 holco has uploaded the schematic. The 14 and 28 uf caps are in the feed. Note the SE version gets full values in single caps whereas the original added 1uf bypasses (ie, 13+1=14). The 43 is a subfeed. Those big ELs are in the shunt position, so they probably make less audible difference but might still offer a sonic improvement with an upgrade. Even if not, it’s worth replacing older ELs. The decision to go with CSAs is partly a choice of price. I mean, does it make sense to put $8000 worth of Dueland caps in a speaker that retailed for $4000? Mundorfs and many others were considered. Tom and I spent many weeks researching and we each spoke with several people with good knowledge before landing on the CSAs. I was pushing for the top of the Clarity line CMRs but Tom got some good info that the CSAs, possibly with small Multicap bypasses, would hit the sweet spot and for much less money. Toms decisions are very well considered and one of the considerations was price. At the end of the day, Tom wants to not stray too far from the Thiel tenet of value while still providing a very worthwhile upgrade. Might you eke out even better performance with Dueland and such? Maybe! Let us know whatever you try. |
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