Gee, I thought the first ocatave was from 20 to 40 Hz? Thiel's measurements are done in an anechoic chamber, so in real practice most will have some in room bass reinforcement.
I do agree that $10K seems a bit much for the this level of bass output.
While I don't dare challange Jim Thiel on technical issues, I do question Thiel's decisions and trends. First of all, I have trouble understanding why Thiel would abandon sealed boxes for passive radiators and ports. I don't understand how passive radiators and ports can possibly be time and phase coherent, something of a Thiel trademark. I doubt the size and corresponding construction costs and transport challanges associated with a larger sealed box would matter that much to people shopping at the upper end of Thiel's range. In as much as equalizers are a red flag to many audiophiles, Thiel has used them sucessfully in the past to offer full range sealed boxed, relatively easy steady 4 Ohm impedance, 89 dB, modestly sized speakers in the past. Heck, the original CS 3 cost $2K 25 years ago and offered all of the above. Now that Thiel has garned experience with digital amps for their subwoofers, I would have imagined using some sort of digital technology for a modern digitaly updated eq'd CS 3-3.5 would have allowed Thiel to cost effectively offer a product with better performance than the current 3 series. This might be especially true now that Thiel develops all their drivers in house. As Thiel has increased the sensitivity of their speakers the impedance have become lower with time. I would imagine that finding higher powered amps into higher impedances would be less difficult and less expensive than finding lower powered amps that can handle lower impedances. Of course many audiophiles wouldn't even consider a product that has the words "equalizer" and "digital" in their description, even if they offered smaller dimensions, better time and phase coherency, more extended bass response, easier amplification requirements, and built in room tailoring. Damn shame.
