Thiel 3.7

Zaikesman,

I got the "semi kit" form of the Orions. It had the woofer box and part of the top panel assembled and painted but I had to screw it all together, install the drivers and wire it up. The EQ/XO was fully assembled. I listened to the speakers at Don Barringer's house. He lives in VA and helped SL with the testing of the Orions. However, the Orions caused a major bass boom in my room that the Thiel CS2.3 and REL sub did not. No amount of moving speaker and chair could get rid of it. I tried homemade bass traps as well as a pair of RealTraps. Nothing helped. Finally, I picked up a refurbished TacT RCS 2.0 and WOW did that help. Not only did it allow me to kill the boom but it really opened up the sound. The Orions alone bested my Thiels but the Tact/Orion pair is the best sound I have ever heard in my 20+ years in audio.

Funny, but I forgot all about the Cinematic Systems VS Thiel war a while back. I agree the Orions seem to do the opposite of everything Thiel does with regards to speaker building. SL knows a thing or two about the subject and is firmly in the science camp.

Tim McTeague

Prices have just been released: $4950 to $5500 EACH depending on finish. These babies better be able to offer some seriously good sound with extended bass response and hopefully a gentle impedance. Geesh, remember when Thiel 3 series had an MSRP of around $2500? These new 3 series are going to cost more than twice as much as the preceeding 2 series in the Thiel line. On another note, Thiel is about release a new SCS model that may actually cost LESS than it's predecessor!

Hmm...I *do* listen to a lot of mono recordings, maybe I can get by with just one...

Has anybody else noticed that some photos of this speaker show what looks like a second passive radiator in place of the conical-diaphragmed bass driver with comparitively mild corrugations that we first saw? With no obvious attachment point for a voice-coil on the heavily corrugated but seemingly essentially flat, dustcap-less diaphragm, might these just have been stand-in appearances by the passive for photo ops while the real driver was out being worked on? Or could the final bass driver in fact employ, similar to the midrange ring, a non-conical, non-dome, corrugated flat diaphragm, outwardly identical to the passive? That would be radical, although I prefer the differentiated look with the grille removed.

Thiel has now posted a new pdf detailing the 3.7's.

Some interesting stuff there. As I speculated about in my previous post, the actual woofer does indeed sport a corrugated flat diaphragm, outwardly the same as the passive and different from earlier photos. The blurb talks about elimination of cavity resonances with this shape, probably more of an issue for a woofer in a first-order design. (I notice that Thiel has now adopted the term "wave-shaped" to describe the woofer and midrange diaphragms. Guess that's more poetic than "corrugated".)

Also learned that the curved cabinet isn't made from scored and bent MDF, but 15-layer molded hardwood ply, a first for Thiel I believe and more unusual. And the baffle is aluminum, like the dome-shaped top. No details yet on the interior construction, but the back seems angled-back similar to the front, although not the same angle. They're specifying 90dB anechoic sensitivity, but a 2.8 ohm minimum impedance, so beefy solid-state would still seem to be the preferred amplification. Anybody hear this at CES?