Thanks Unsound for alerting us. I've held off doing anything about upgrading my 2.2's for this long largely to wait and see what JT did with the 3.7. The last time I spoke with Shari about it he supposedly had just begun to sit down with the proverbial blank sheet of paper. I strongly suspected the new iteration would have to include some clear advances/evolutions over all previous models, and wondered how he could do that while still slotting the thing under the 6- and 7-series models. This model looks to address a couple of fundamental issues that I've been hoping Thiel would get around to in the next generation of new products, namely:
1) Continuing to utilize coincidental mid/tweeter geometry to reduce frequency lobing and expand the listening window, while moving to extend HF dispersion by getting the tweeter out of the horn-like concavity of a midrange cone (I believe only the 7-series has addressed this in the past). I'll be honest: my prefered theoretical solution was to see a mid/tweeter dome arrangment, with the two drivers forming a continuous-profile dome with the motor assembly, made small by the use of powerful rare-earth magnets and Thiel's shared voice-coil technology, placed within the dome. (Just picture it as a sonic breast with a nipple in the middle :-) I feel a dome shape for the midrange diaphragm must be somewhat stiffer (as is a cone) than any corrugated flat profile like was adopted here (not that you couldn't corrugate a dome as well for even greater stiffness), and also that a dome offers the widest dispersion for both mid and tweeter. This is not without challenges, since the whole driver unit would project forward of the baffle which is somewhat unusual, and achieving time-alignment with the LF drivers would then require a greater baffle angle, but only if we're assuming Thiel's traditional baffle arrangement paradigm, instead of moving to some sort of "baffleless" situation of the M/T driver, which may be inevitable down the road anyway.
2) Moving beyond the company's previous cabinet design, which, despite the angled and contoured baffle that was something of a watershed back when first introduced, continued to employ a traditional square-backed box made of MDF. The new model's rounded aluminum cabinet top (ending closer to the height of the M/T driver rather than extending higher up as on previous Thiels) and what looks to be a parabolic contour to the cabinet rear, were in my estimation the kind advances required if Thiel was not to fall behind some of their competitors in the area of modern cabinet design and appearance. Although I've never been crazy about the idea of resorting to 3" thick MDF for the baffle from the standpoint of internal diffraction (especially around the midrange driver -- I find the thinner, non-MDF cast baffles of Thiel's upline models to be a more elegant solution to the rigidity issue), positioning the M/T driver nearer to the cabinet top ought to provide image height/openness benefits, and the contoured back should be much stiffer/less resonant (and possibly reduce internal standing waves, though my own hunch is that other manufacturers of similar cabinet shapes may be overhyping this aspect to a degree). It also seems to look pretty good (not great necessarily, and maybe a little derivative -- natural convergence could be a factor here -- but I'll wait to see it in person), even if you can't any longer place an album jacket temporarily on top of the speaker! (I'm assuming this cabinet must also be shorter and deeper the the old design.)
I'll be interested to learn a few other things (and the price of course), such as whether the 3.7 uses a separate or shared voice-coil arrangement for the M/T driver (shared would've been my assumption, but then I'd expect the promo lit to trumpet it), where the crossover points are, how exactly the cabinet is formed and of what materials (I'd like to see horizontally stacked, die-cut ply for the back and sides if we're staying with wood, but suspect it's a ribbed and bent MDF/veneer laminate for now), and where Thiel will next take these new approaches with the remainder of the model lineup. Some other random observations:
The corrugated aluminum cone drivers remind me a bit of those used in Energy's upline speakers.
Thiel continues to favor aluminum, extending its use into the cabinet area (hardly a novelty, just new for them I believe).
Thiel doesn't yet abandon the use of wood structurally, along with an overall wooden furniture appearance. I do think this is an intermediate step, and that in the not too distant future all manufacturers serious about competing in the area of cutting edge cabinet design will have moved beyond the speaker-as-wooden-furniture paradigm, as several already have. This is usually not done without a cost penalty however, and I'm aware and thankful that one of Thiel's priorities is to provide a decent value.
I see that the 3.7 still adheres to placement of the active LF driver rather far down the baffle, near the floor and well below ear height. In most speaker designs this is not a problem, given where the crossover point is typically located and its slope. But in Thiel's 3-way designs, the LF crossover point is usually at least in the middle of the midrange (I believe anywhere from 600 to 1kHz depending on the model), and combined with the slow 6dB-per octave roll-off of a 1st-order design, this means that the large driver is putting out significant sound well into the upper mids. I know that with my 2.2's, which cross over at 800Hz, I find that having a driver responsible for that much of the midrange placed as low as it is, and spaced relatively far from upper midrange and HF drivers, can lead to what I perceive as a bit of "vertical discontinuity" of imaging and an unrealistically lowish image height for many instruments and vocalists.
To that end, I wonder if maybe the next generation of Thiel's 4-way model could feature a triaxial LM/UM/T arrangement (I think only Cabasse does this now, and they do it as a dome which as I said does appeal to me). In any case I would like to see Thiel pursue increased symmetry of radiation from the lower midrange and up in their floorstanding models, whether by going triaxial or employing some sort of D'Appolito-inspired symmetrical driver array in combination with the coaxial units, as they've done in a stand-mount design.
Thiel has not yet jumped on the more-exotic-than-aluminum tweeter or "super-tweeter" bandwagons.
I find it interesting that the passive LF radiator is now a corrugated aluminum cone instead of the previous stiff-core foam flat, and wonder what prompted the switch and what the sonic benefit is supposed to be.
I also wonder where the introduction of this model leaves the 6- and 7-series models. If I had to guess, I'd say the next-gen ones could feature some of Thiel's "SmartSub" technology built into the speaker and more extensive structural use of aluminum.
Ultimately I also wonder if/when Thiel will follow their overall sonic aims to what would seem to be their logical conclusion and make an entire speaker system that utiltizes line-level crossovers and multi-way amplification (perhaps digital, perhaps outboard, perhaps sat/sub) to better achieve their design goals without the limitations imposed by the traditional passive onboard crossover/component amplifier approach...
