October 1999

Thiel Audio Factory Tour
by Marc Mickelson

Listening

My tour of Thiel’s facilities began in the larger of two custom-built listening rooms, and this only whet my appetite to hear some music as I was touring the factory thereafter. Thiel’s main listening room is what we audiophiles dream about: 34'L x 22'W x 14'H, studs 12" on center, two layers of sheeting glued, proportions calculated to distribute standing waves evenly, transformers for the lights mounted outside the building. Even the fins for the heating/cooling registers were specially designed to cut down on noise. The room has its own power supply, and the trusses for the ceiling are specially laid out to give the ceiling incredible strength. "You could literally drive a Mack truck on it," Jim Thiel told to me.

This room is part board room, with a long table at one end, but the rest of the area is for listening. There are multiple pairs of Thiel speakers, racks of CDs and LPs, and enough electronic equipment to put together a number of high-performance systems. I’m sure many customers call Thiel and ask which brands of electronics they recommend, but judging from what they have in their listening room, they have no real favorite. Audio Research, VAC, Mark Levinson, Classé, and Krell are all represented. Thiel also has a smaller listening room, 14' x 20' or so I would guess, that was devoted to home theater during my visit. I was able to hear systems set up in both rooms.

I started out listening in the big room to the CS2.3s along with Krell, Classé and Levinson electronics. The sound was clear and alive, and it brought to mind Jon Gale’s review of the speakers, which I’ve subsequently re-read and agree with completely. Jon’s review will give you more information on the CS2.3s than I can here, but I will say that I came away thinking how resolving the speakers sounded in Thiel’s immense room.

After the CS2.3s, I listened at length to the top-of-the-line CS7.2s, which I can confidently say are better than the smaller and less expensive speakers in every way. Not only was the bass more extended and visceral, but the midrange displayed greater palpability and the highs were more naturally detailed and even a touch sweet. The speakers were at least twelve feet apart, and this helped them cast a gargantuan and airy soundstage that was fully populated right to left and front to back -- no holes or dead spots. I was sitting probably 18 feet from the speakers, but it was obvious that the room had no obvious character of its own to impart on the music -- no slap echo, no floor or wall bounce, no nothing.

I brought along seven CDs and played cuts from all of them, some cuts twice. In each case, the resolution of the system was obvious, but I never felt fatigued or had a sense of the music being unnaturally forward or bright, two things to which I am acutely sensitive. The CS2.3s could sound ragged when fed a CD that was less than pristine, and I brought a couple of these just to test the speakers’ preservation of the original signal. But while with the CS7.2s it was obvious that a less-than-perfect recording was just that, it wasn’t bothersome sonically, even though I could hear more of the recording. Hmmm. I can only speculate now (I was too busy enjoying myself then) and say that "better in every way" also means a much more distortion-free rendition of the music. The CS7.2s sounded alive, natural and extended. We look forward to reviewing them sometime in the future.

In the smaller room was a five-speaker system with no subwoofer, but all of the speakers were Thiel MCS1s, which are rated to deliver bass down to 50Hz. Here it was refreshing to hear musical bass notes from a home-theater system, meaning that they weren’t like plodding dinosaur steps but rather drums whomps and bass lines. I especially enjoyed hearing, and seeing via a Sony Wega monitor, a James Taylor concert DVD, which sounded not like audio on a video system, but music on an audio system, which is what Thiel had assembled.

To find out more about Thiel Audio,
visit their website at www.thielaudio.com