Thiel Owners

Beetle - I concur with your results and consider the passive parts to be important and know the work Thiel put into finding best bang for buck, always knowing that more bang could be bought. The shunts are in my experience more important than generally thought. In an AC resonance circuit all parts are in play. I am approaching the physical stuff first for practical reasons; I can compare multiple speakers with various treatments to gain experience with less investment.
Dsper - the hiss is coming from the amp chain, not the speaker.The CS5 has rubber pads on the upper and floor woofer and the 5i has center weights.

With all these variables related to parts of a passive xo, any experience how a passive xo compares to a digital active xo? Maybe I should hook up my passive xo again.

Happy Friday! All

tomthiel,

"...hiss is coming from the amp chain, not the speaker.The CS5 has rubber pads on the upper and floor woofer and the 5i has center weights..."

Tom, please bear with a couple of basic questions:

1. Reducing hiss then, is around acquiring quieter components in the chain. This would then also reduce the noise floor and allow more detail to be heard?
2. If I want to check if I have CS5's or CS5i's, I simply unscrew one of the woofers and look at it?

Thanks for your advice!

Dsper

dsper - noise floor reduction is an element of greater dynamic range, but the ear-brain is very good at inferring musical signal that "should be" buried in the noise floor. Yes, quieter is better, but it isn't everything. I suggest classic troubleshooting - find some other components to swap and determine where your noise is coming from. Could be tube noise.Speaker noises can include a throaty hissing, usually under load, if capacitors are failing, but I would rule out the amps first.
No need to unscrew anything. Take off the grille and inspect the bottom and third (sub) woofers for rubber mats (CS5) or center weights (CS5i).