Thiel Owners

@unsound 

Think of consumers having 2 cables going to thier speakers ,
imagine manufactures trying to sell you 2 cables per speaker ,
let alone the increase in cost .

My freind came over with Shunyata Balck Momba speaker cables ,
2 per speaker and only 16awg , they had a very thick outer shield making them almost imposible to bend , BUT what a sound improvement . Was it the shielding or the separation ?

I couldn't afford to upgrade and buying another set of the same cables was still more expensive than making my own cables .
So using a single run of Cardas 9.5 chassis wire for each polarity was the an affordable option . 
I heard an improvement and passed it on as something for others to try.
As for shielding ? 

When I opened my speakers and found the wiring inside to be
side by side like lamp cord I seperated them and heard an improvement.

I'm still waiting to hear from Rob G on why my or all 2.7s have this wiring instead of the straight wire that was standard in all other Thiels .
  

@vari66robert, It seems as though many manufacturers  of speaker cables have taken to additional effort to bring conductors as close as possible, going beyond merely efficiency of packaging. Brands like Vandersteen suggest separate bi-wire runs of speaker cable, not that much different than separate conductors for single terminal runs.

It might add value to describe my approach to the cable differences. First, a disclaimer. I do not claim to know how the variables of cable interact with each other. I am apprised of the textbook basics of capacitance blocking low frequencies, inductance rolling of highs, etc. And I know that dielectric absorption matters and a few conversational recommendations. And I also know that those things don't explain for me, and it seems for many very expert engineers, what we hear.

Today is not about what I think I might be hearing. It's about my setup, which might provide food for thought or questions, especially from more knowledgeable folks. Here goes. One corner of my studio has a corner baffle with floor-level bass vent into other space. This corner measures well. My amps are overhead with multiple jacks and knife switches for setting up quick-change tests. My chair is about 6' from the V point of the L-shaped room, so there is little reflection from behind. The mic is right in front of me, so it hears about what I hear. For this test, two CS2.2 are side-by side, one meter from the diagonal baffle behind them. My chair is 2.5M (100") back and the mic is 2M - I get usable measurements and hearing in this setup. In this case I have wired speaker A with 2 runs of Straightwire Octave II in standard configuration: + and - in each cable. So there are 4 wires running in 2 cables, each containing a + and a -.
The B speaker has the same cables, but one cable is ++ and the other is --. Those cables are separated by more than 12" in configuration B, and they are taped side-by side in configuration C. Today I am listening to Rory Block's "I'm Every Woman" which has enough of everything I need.

I also run FuzzMeasure through the system to document A, B and C. More coming after lunch.

If we had the luxury of the Great Symposium where we could hash these issues out with George Cardas, Bill Low Audiouest, Steve Straightwire and various astrophysicists of our choice, we could learn a lot. But in real life, we must make whatever progress we can make, learning from experience and limited knowledge and paying attention to lots of leads.

Here's a memory of such a lead. The CS5 had a huge crossover that included 2 huge bucket brigade delays in addition to 4 crossovers for the 5 drivers, which had huge magnets. Talk about a pot of soup. We used our usual solid 18 gauge tight twist in teflon. Jim always included the speaker wire runs in his calculations and tests. In other words, those wire runs add resistance, inductance and capacitance to the crossover circuits, and he included that in his design / execution work. OK. In final (4 months long!) listening tests, those crossovers came in and out lots of times. The workhorse pair used straight single wires from the XO terminals to a terminal block mounted on the side of the cabinet. Eventually the twisted driver runs were hooked directly to the XO, and there was "a sound" that couldn't be accounted for in electrical terms nor in concept engineering terms. We chose the final 9" to 12", depending on which driver,  to be left untwisted. Something about how the wire-fields were interacting with the "pot of soup" made that configuration sound better. It is possible that Jim gained additional knowledge as time went on, but at that time none of us nor anything we could learn could explain much of anything about the heard phenomenon.

We may be in a similar situation with these cable runs. I ran tests on A, B and C as described above. All the tests in my kit - to see if there were changes introduced by the different configurations. I can't detect any. So far I have listened to Morrow SP-4 and Straightwire Octave II. Both exhibit similar differences. Both are sophisticated cables. I have not yet tried my ProCo (Beldenesque) HiPure 4-conductor "normal" stranded cables. What I learned from the SW, is that the 3 configurations measure as "identical". There are no measured differences that I can identify to account for the heard differences. So, whoever goes comparing, you can dismiss the potential cause of measurable frequency response changes, or impulse or phase changes. It's something else.

As an end user, Rob can choose whichever he likes better. Fair enough. As a designer, I must pursue understanding that might be applied in the internal wiring as well as fodder for this user mill's advancement.

I'll be calling Steven Hill and George Cardas to pick some brains. I'll be very interested in what Beetle reports. Any other input is also much appreciated.

@vair68robertt
I'm still waiting to hear from Rob G on why my or all 2.7s have this wiring instead of the straight wire that was standard in all other Thiels

Earlier, in a discussion about 2.7s in another web page, Jim Thiel was reported to have said that when the 2.7s were designed, he used information he'd gained from the 3.7s.