green mountains

03-29-12: Unsound
Bombaywalla, perhaps I'm the one that's mistaken, but I think you might be confusing electrical phase for mechanical phase?

Thiel's previous products before the use of concentric drivers had different plots, e.g.:

www.stereophile

www.stereophile

www.stereophile

BTW, for those that might not have been aware of this (IMHO, perhaps the best thread to ever appear on Audiogon):

forum.audiogon#151

Unsound, no I was not mistaking mechanical phase for electrical phase.
All-the-same thanx for posting those measurements for earlier Thiel speakers. Those imp & ph plots look a lot better than the ones I posted of more recent Thiel speakers. I can see now why Prdprez posted that Thiels are coherent speakers.
So, why in the world, did Thiel depart from a good thing - his original coherent speaker design as the more recent speakers from Thiel measure worse imp & phase-wise meaning more distortion of the music signal??

yeah, I agree that thread was an awesome one. That's exactly the thread I read again & again & again & again + spoke to Roy about its contents for many hrs & ultimately ended buying a Green Mountain Audio speaker! I would recommend reading all those posts in that thread until the contents are fully digested. The reader will learn a LOT....

Bombaywalla, I can only guess why. Perhaps for cost savings, improved time and dispersion coherence, and ease of loudspeaker placement? Since it appears as though the concentric drivers use a mechanical rather than an electrical cross-over, perhaps the sum at the listening position is corrected for?
Considering what was posted by Roy in that thread, I have to wonder why there isn't more use of sealed box enclosures by the loudspeaker designers that adhere to this philosophy.?
I think ultimately somehow digital technology will make these ideas more accurate and practical.

Georger and Dgarretson, I own the chroma which is the new model and uses the same drive units as the EOS which you have.
I have not found the tone balance on the speaker to be strictly neutral. It tends to be more pronounced in the low mids. What is your opinion on the tone balance of the EOS?

Kenjit, Eos moves lots of air through dual ports to achieve mid-bass and LF reinforcement uncharacteristic of most monitor speakers. In any reflex design there are inevitable trade-offs between LF extension and mid-bass and LF coherance. Eos does well in this regard, but its strongest suit is seamless mid to treble. Sitting in the sweet spot close to near-field listening the soundstage is deep and wide with exceptionally stable images contained inside less diffuse boundaries than one may be accustomed to in speakers exhibiting greater phase distortion. The experience takes a bit of getting used to, and falls into the catagory of "less is more."

While "coherant" in terms of phase response, they may not be the last word in resolution and expressiveness of nuances of timbre-- which should be no surprise at this price point. However I haven't heard anything in the $5K range that surpasses them, and their small sins can be forgiven as sins of omission rather than commission.

Why would Thiel deviate from their superior measuring earlier designs??
Simple, this industry demands new products in order for a company to remain viable. This makes things very difficult for any Time/Phase practitioner to survive on anything but the small scale that Roy is maintaining. Case in point is Meadowlark and Dunlavy. Dunlavy came out of the gate with what is quite arguably the most accurate speaker line in the history of audio. (technically speaking) But where to go from there? And Meadowlark, their designs mostly changed with much improved cosmetics in the end. Neither survived.
There are only a small number of music lovers that actually care about truly accurate sound. (The rest are "audiophiles" aka "gear-o-philes")
The Thiel approach, no doubt, was to start looking towards marketing savvy exotic things. Joining the exotic driver bandwagon, etc.
Dunlavy flatly refused to move from the drivers he was familiar with. And Meadowlark took the route of trying to make ever more affordable designs while relying greatly on improved cosmetics and, to a lesser degree, improved performance.
But, ultimately, once you've designed a great time/phase coherent speaker you are essentially competing with yourself. There comes a certain saturation point where the anti time/phase coherent nature of the industry as a whole severely limits the gathering of new converts. And given that fact that a companies older time/phase accurate designs outperform newer "exotic" IN-coherent designs, these products are snatched up on the used market, doing the original manufacturer no good. They must rely, increasingly, on existing customers "upgrading".

On another note...
I've exchanged emails with Roy a few times and would really love to meet him someday. But I did have similar long exchanges with Pat McGinty (Meadowlark) and John Dunlavy. It's truly a very different conversation than with ANY of the other speaker designers out there. I would describe it as educational versus indoctrinational.