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.
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.