Thiel Owners

Easter Sunday - All

Andy2 and all -

I say that neither Jim nor Thiel Audio would espouse valuing ’"time coherence above other aspects of sound reproduction". Our company was built around addressing and honoring ALL aspects of sonic/signal/musical reproduction as a whole. Most designers - products minimize the importance of the time-phase aspects of fidelity, especially in the day that we did it. Only a handful of brands made time/phase behavior important - including Thiel, Vandersteen and Dunlavy and Quad, and possibly some smaller attempts.

Note our attention to time-phase was not above other aspects, but as one among several necessary ingredients for faithful representation of the musical signal.

Having paid attention to this stuff for half a century, my perspective is that keeping time-phase correct allows the ear-brain to pay attention to the playback signal as though it were real - thereby permitting a more holistic, immersive experience of the music. Although we rarely admit it, we humans do not possess unlimited brain-power. Work is required to reconstruct a musical signal that is missing its time domain content into an interpretation that makes sense. That effort subtracts from the state of consciousness that is possible when experiencing real music, either in its un-recorded state or its time-phase correct played back state.

Among the most frequent comments re Thiel/Van/Dun/Quad, etc. are ’naturalness’ and ’image density’. These are psychoacoustic attributes facilitated by the addition of phase-time correctness to the other realms of dynamic and tonal correctness.

I assess that designing for all of the musical aspects rather than discounting or fudging against the time-phase aspect requires an order of magnitude more effort. Everything becomes extremely more complex and difficult.

I can only afford a summary overview, the details took a career to address, and the work is still not finished.

mchan888

PM received. New message sent.

Happy Listening!

I say that neither Jim nor Thiel Audio would espouse valuing ’"time coherence above other aspects of sound reproduction"

I think all speakers design is a compromise.  If one aimed to achieve time coherence design, one compromise other aspects of the sound reproduction.

Indeed.

Thiel's requirements of passing a square wave / exhibiting a single, proper step response, etc. increase difficulty so much that most practitioners consider it impractical or even a fool's errand. We went for it despite the difficulties. We were young and idealistic, plus we wanted to make a mark and improve the art. Over the years, we invented improvements that managed the inherent problems. 

The biggest problem/ limitation is dynamic range because each driver covers 7 octaves rather than 2 or 3. A driver acting outside its sweet spot has larger excursions, must dissipate more heat, enters break-up, etc. All those must be counter-acted with considerable difficulties. We began inventing new driver technologies withing the first several years.

It is also much harder to get smooth frequency response in a coherent system. Thiel's elaborate crossovers create complimentary circuits to correct driver anomalies that steeper slope filters would make less obvious. Also, we migrated to stiff diaphragms because their mis-behaviors are simpler, more predictable and therefore more manageable with circuitry. Those components introduce their own sonic degrades and add cost. 

We addressed these issues as cost effectively as possible. Our performance per cost was extremely high. As manufacturing director and later consultant to other manufacturers, I know that our output/cost was a multiple of average and our margins were a fraction of average. We tried harder.

Thiel's results were often less than best in some respects, but generally first-rate if one values over-all high performance on all fronts. Our speakers addressed everything quite thoroughly rather than a few things brilliantly. We believe our products supported a more musically authentic experience than conventional approaches.

I can say that Jim / we might not have gone there if we had known how hard it would be. I suspect that hind-sight and insight would have led us to the later-stage insight that we used in home theater products. We could maintain respectable phase coherence and proper time alignment while considerably reducing difficulty  with the fudge of keeping first order slopes for an octave on each side of the crosspoint and then migrating to second order symmetrical slopes beyond that. Out of band excursion and erratic behavior is greatly minimized while keeping the critical advantages of single step response and coincident time arrival. But you can't solve the puzzle until you know enough to solve it.

Most brands didn't and still don't even try what we we did. I'm glad we did.