Thiel Owners

Tom
"Thiel was always going for pistonic driver behavior and the wavy drivers take that way up."

Did you make use of the Thiele/Small Parameters ?

George, yes we did. Jim was very mathematically oriented. The TS parameters were quite new when we began, and I doubt we would have tried speakers without them. Our first drivers were from Eminence and Long Engineering, whom we cajoled Into deriving the TSPs, which was a kick in the pants for them, a solid starting place for us, and the 01, 02 and O3s were unbelievable for their time due to hard , predictive engineering rather than progressive guesses, which was the order of the day.

Tom, Thank You!

George

tomthiel,

A life time lover of Thiel Audio, I never managed to own any myself - either due to $, space, or SAF restrictions. Although I had never heard them, the Powerpoints always intrigued me, so when I recently stumbled onto a set of 5 Powerpoint 1.2’s, I grabbed them. I was blown away in a rudimentary 2.1 audition on the floor (hardwood over concrete). In fact, the imaging was so convincing that my SO wandered into the room and asked what I’d done to the floorstanders next to them. “Her voice sounds so natural”. She then noticed the Powerpoints and asked, “And what are those things on the floor?! They look like boobs!” Which, in fact they do. No wonder I’d always been intrigued! In fact, I was so impressed that I’ve been accumulating Powerplanes as well - perhaps to supplement the PPoints in a future multichannel project. I’m even a bit sorry to have missed those recent Viewpoints for the bedroom TV.

I was powering the PP1.2’s with a Bluesound Powernode 2i which is what I had on hand. Although the little (60W) hybrid digital amp is quite respectable in it’s own right, I have to wonder if I couldn’t do better. I have tried to follow your PP1.2 saga, but the thread is HUGE and the search function may not have turned up all your posts. I’ve never found what you are using to drive yours. Any recommendations - preferably used/depreciated? And do you cross them to a sub? I’ve accumulated both the 2 and 5 channel dedicated Thiel passive sub crossovers as well. ;-)

The trail seems to have grown cold on the external crossover mods - seemingly related to the bankruptcy settlement. Any updates there?

Thx in advance. And in retrospect as well.

Tom Thiel when you stated Long Engineering was that the company of Ed Long who patented the Time Align setup for crossovers? In the early 80’s a friend and I contracted Ed Long to design a 8 in midbass driver and a 4 inch midrange driver that were built by Eminence which is about 30 miles from my home.

The 8 inch was in a rather small sealed enclosure and the mid and tweeter were mounted on sculpted panel time offset to the wooden cabinet attached below. The midrange was mounted in a open back damped tube. Both the 8 in and 4 inch were very shallow in cone depth. Ed’s thinking was the deeper the cone the more time the cone was out of time alignment as it traveled. Of course Ed designed the crossover as well.

The bass eventually became a early version of the ELF subwoofers who along with Long was patented by Ron Wickersham . Eminence built us 10 inch woofers which we mounted 2 in a each separate but attached cabinet. These also had a time offset. The drivers were crossed over below the system resonance point and we put in use a Mcintosh MQ 104 xover and eq for the woofers extension and control. They were powered by a Tom Holman amp. Incredible soundstage and super fast powerful bass with no boom or overhang. May be the the best integrated bass I have ever heard to this day. Good luck to all following this thread and sharing their experiences and upgrades. Tom