Thiel Owners

Holco - thank you for the report.
Regarding leakage - ideally you want none, but practically a small woofer enclosure leak doesn't do much. Are both channels the same? Of serious concern is if the woofer enclosure leaks into the midrange sub-enclosure. Push both the woofer and passive and see if the midrange moves. If so, troubleshoot.

Regarding foil coils. I await your comments on that change. News from the research front: foil alloy is considerably purer than wire alloy. As I've mentioned, Thiel used 6-9s ultra aerospace wire from 1978 onward. By 1995 that wire was no longer available and we used 4-9s specified as C10100plus. That seems to be the best wire currently in use, except for specialty boutique producers such as Cardas. I have learned that ERSE, Jantzen and other high-end suppliers now top out at 3-9s C11000 @99.9% with higher oxygen allowances. Jantzen specifically disclaims audible benefits beyond this C11000 grade, etc. etc.
My personal experience is to the contrary, having spent the summer of '78 comparing wire. Some auditory brains hear the difference. I am currently exploring a solution strategy.

Beetle - your FST coils and hookup wire meet the C11000 spec. But your FST coil winding was less than best. I await your experience with Cardas hookup wire.

Audio inductor foil meets better than C10100. It is as good as the original ITT 6-9s aerospace wire that I secured in 1978. So the generally accepted higher performance of foil coils might be attributable to some combination of  foil skin effect reduction, tighter wrap and purity of alloy.

Lotta mystery.

Great that there are subjective improvements noted with the upgrade. Can we agree on objective measurements that would capture such an audible improvements and continue the Thiel tradition of both objective and subjective substantiation of improvements?

From Jim Thiel in Soundstage review of 2.4SE
http://www.soundstageultra.com/equipment/thiel_cs24se.htm


How were the improvements measured? Jim Thiel again: "The improved resolution is not the kind of thing that shows up well in measurements; the magnitude of the difference between the CS2.4 and the CS2.4SE is more easily heard than discerned from graphs. The new capacitors allow more nuance, air, detail, and decay to be reproduced by the coaxial drive unit. This was especially evident to us when listening to recordings that contained realistic reverberation, as well as recordings where the instruments were not processed heavily."

Rules - if an engineer with today's tools put his chops to it, the differences could probably be verified. It takes a lot of doing and my experience is that measurements only verify what we already learn through listening. I suspect the Klippel analysis system could show some relevant information. I don't know who might be working at such a fine level of analysis.

For the record, what Thiel would do is discern the improvement by ear, then subject the change to objective measurement. If anything could be determined to be harmed then it's "back to work". If no objective change could be measured, then it's down to cost / benefit discussion among the team.

@tomthiel 
Not that I’m an expert or professional but that approach sounds “right”. Measurements are useful for identifying problems but not necessarily helpful for indicating superior SQ. How is it that amps, for example, with similar measurements sound so different? The improvements I’m hearing in terms of resolution and transparency are undeniable but I’m doubtful there would be any meaningful difference on a frequency response or waterfall plot.