tomthiel
Responses from tomthiel
| Thiel Owners Dsper - I suspect something other than your speakers or amps. Your room setup may invite improvement (they always do), but rarely cause high frequency problems, except from side-wall bounce. Is there a hard surface where you would see the speaker ... | |
| Thiel Owners Effort actually goes into minimizing the weight of the speaker. Each element: panels, braces, driver structures and diaphragms, etc. tries to get as stiff as possible per unit mass, in order to drive resonances higher in frequency where they are h... | |
| Thiel Owners Robin - Yes, the SmartSubs are Class D. Jim began working on those amps with a very talented designer at/from Vifa in the late 80s. They put quite a bit of sophistication into those designs, which were done in the early dark ages of Class D. Impe... | |
| Thiel Owners I caution that we should distinguish between makes & models rather than commenting on "class D amps" in general. A lot of progress has been made with switching rates and filters so that some class D amps are leagues ahead of other class D amps. | |
| Thiel Owners Prof - From the beginning in '74-'75 the goal was to find the best platform on which to build a line. We investigated (translate designed and built) spherical arrays, line sources, panels, folded horns, powered multi-driver speakers, and I may be ... | |
| Thiel Owners Peter Aczel attempted with the Audio Critic to reconcile the objectivist with the subjectivist models of evaluation. A watershed event was his endorsement of Andy Rappaport's AMP-1 which was a zero feedback, highly coherent power amp that carried ... | |
| Thiel Owners Beetle - that distinction may be the watershed between hi fi and high end. Hi fi, dominated by academic engineers, mathemeticians and physicists definitely listened with their fore-brains and negated the existence that couldn't at least be verifie... | |
| Thiel Owners One advantage a manufacturer has is the ability to compare samples with 0 to hundreds of burn-in hours. Speakers, cables, caps. Very interesting what one hears with an open mind. | |
| Thiel Owners Prof - at Thiel we all began as skeptics. Through thousands of experiments over dozens of years, we gradually adopted the Modus Operandi of believing what we hear, rather than what we understand. There are countless ways to lack cognition of exper... | |
| Thiel Owners Ron and Prof, Ron's 3.7s are new old stock as I interpret the particulars. Rob has various cabinets and parts and I believe he assembled that pair from such service parts. So, all the parts would be unused. Break-in is something that many engineer... | |
| Thiel Owners I believe that if home theater and other spectacular bass recordings (ie: 1812 Overture Canons) had not been on the rise, Thiel may have stuck with sealed enclosure bass. The CS5 was developed as a guidepost to the future; its tweeter went into th... | |
| Thiel Owners tms, I'm sorry I don't know the model numbers. One was a big Krell, another a pair of big Levinson monoblocs, and a Bryston. I was there on a visit and not really in the loop. Rob Gillum knows, but he is swamped with Coherent Source Service. I'll ... | |
| Thiel Owners Prof and Eagle, I really appreciate your thoughts; you have far more experience with the products than I do (one listening session in 2012I) I would need to get intimate the products before forming a hypothesis. I will say that the Model 2 has alw... | |
| Thiel Owners Prof, I had seen that quote from Phil here before. The story from Thiel doesn't really match all that well. Regarding the 2dB/decade, I don't really see that in my perusal of comparative test results. I wish that Stereophile had reviewed the 2.7 s... | |
| Thiel Owners Jeff, the point is that such a system (CSnext) required far more horsepower than available from an individual who may have played some minor role. Creating a design team after Jim's departure was a huge undertaking. The 2.7, 1.7 and MCS (#next) we... |