@tomthiel
Prof, as a technical note, that wavy driver behaves better than any of the previous cone drivers as well as supports the tweeter wave-form launch very nicely. Therefore the direct series crossover path is simpler than any previous Thiel driver. Jim had always corrected for slope anomalies in all the drivers, which puts additional components in the signal path. In the x.7 models, fewer components are required because the fundamental driver performance is so good. Part of what you hear is the thrill of nothingness.
Sorry I missed responding.
Thanks for that info. Very interesting.
It’s been a while since I read up on first order time/phase coherent crossovers, but I remember that one of the detriments can be some form of interference, or cancellation, I think between the tweeter and midrange driver if I remember. In any case, although I also really liked the old Meadowlark speakers (first order time/phase coherent) this cancellation is something I really noticed. Sit at just the right position or height and it was great. But move, especially vertically getting up from the chair and there was this weird hollowing and a sort of odd "shifting" of the sound, that turned me off. I forget whether I ever heard this from the Dunlavy designs.
I did perceive a very slight hollowing out of the midrange on the old Thiel CS6. But as I’ve said, to my ears this last generation coax by Jim nailed it. It’s just totally coherent, in a way almost no other box speaker I’ve heard can manage. No apparent suck-out or discontinuity, and from a large listening area as well, tonally.
In another forum thread I’ve been detailing an extensive list of speakers I’ve been demoing. Every time I come back to the Thiels they just show up the speakers I just heard in terms of utter coherency and disappearing as obvious forms of distortion or as sound sources. The truly amazing trick with the Thiels is that they not only "disappear" effortlessly as sound sources in a way most speakers are aiming for, but they don’t end up with the wispy sound that many "disappearing" speakers conjure. Instead the sonic images of the Thiels have such density. The impression I sometimes have is that the field in between my Thiels have been replaced by more speakers making sound!
