Thiel 3.7

Hey! What happened to the old Shari?? This can't be good...

Looking closely at the photos on the website, I don't think the new compound driver uses the shared voice-coil design. It seems to have two adjacent inner suspension gaskets, one for the tweeter dome and another for the midrange diaphragm.

(Also, I'm thinking that passive radiator looks as if it's going to be a sore point for survivability problems with kids/dogs/vacuum-cleaners unless they provide some sort of screen for it behind the grille...)

Shari's husband was tranferred and they had to move, not too far but far enough to make for an unpleasant commute. That's the official story, anyway. She has gone to work for our own Larry Staples at LSA/DK Design.

Hi Dan, thanks for the info, you're another one I haven't communicated with in too long. I saw a thread recently about phase- and time-accurate designs where you mentioned you've moved on to Harbeths and are well pleased (I almost contributed to that thread too, but decided it would take too long a lecture to disabuse the Hardesty-clone true believers that what they hold so dear isn't as cut'n'dried as they idealize it). I never was convinced you were satisfied keeping the 2.4's, respected them maybe but not in love...feel free to elaborate :-)

Alex, I didn't sell the Thiels until two weeks ago. A typical pattern for me: I will own more than one component at a time and be unable to decide which I prefer. Eventually I just let something go in order to break the logjam. But you are right that I was never in love with the Thiels. They are a great, great speaker, but time to move on. The Harbeths are working nicely for me now, but I doubt they will be the last stop. The constant tension between music lover and audiophile. The Harbeths communicate the music so well and sound so beautiful. Tonight I put on a CD I rarely listen to, Charlie Haden and Hank Jones playing mainly old spirituals. It's always struck me as too spare. Not this time. It reached out and grabbed me, made complete sense musically. That's what we have systems for, right? But then I'll turn around and start thinking, boy, I sure wish these Harbeths used a better tweeter, I really need to try a Maggie or something with a Scanspeak Revelator or whatever. It's hard for me to be content. But I rarely am with anything. My character issues manifest fiercely in the hobby.

LOL. (BTW, did you ever decide that you liked the 2.4 as well as you had the 1.6?) As for me, I think my main "issue" with speakers is what I would call trust: Whenever I hear a speaker that makes a certain disk or piece of music sound unusually great, I typically find that it isn't telling the truth and will be correspondingly not-so-great on other music or disks (not saying the Harbeth is this way - I don't believe I've ever heard a Harbeth, and anyway I thought they were supposed to be fairly "neutral" as the saying goes). I feel comfortable that the Thiels are pretty reliable messengers which I can trust, but at the same time realize that there are certainly aspects of the sound that my (after all relatively modest) speakers aren't capable of fully expressing (mainly having to do with the rich body, physicality, dynamism, ease and sweetness of real music). But I can't, unlike many audiophiles, be happy switching speakers often -- I need a consistent point of reference, and besides I'm also a cheapstake who isn't pursuing the SOTA. I started building this system by choosing my Thiels in '97, and have only recently really begun to think that I (and the rest of my system) might be ready to contemplate taking another step, which if/when it happens I presume would be "for keeps" for even longer next time...

Anyhoo, I've been thinking about the midrange driver on that 3.7, and it's occured to me that it might well not be driven at the inner or outer edge of the diaphragm, unlike typical cones or domes. The coil former might be attached at the center point of the ring, midway between the suspension surrounds, giving the diaphragm added rigidity by taking the form of a "T"-shaped cross-section. This would make a lot of sense in combination with the radial corrugation of the diaphragm visible in the photos, and very possibly indicate the kind of lightness and rigidity implied by the high first resonance point figure quoted by Unsound. (Lighter than could probably be achieved if the center-driven diaphragm projected forward in a similar-sized semi-toroidal ring, partly because the former itself can be made very short with the flat diaphragm.) If the flat corrugated ring is indeed center-driven, that would be one explanation for why the compound driver doesn't use Thiel's shared voice-coil technology. The only thing about this conjecture is that the driver is described as being 5" in diameter, which would make for an absolutely prodigously-sized voice-coil width-wise, though presumably very shallow in depth.