Kentucky manufacturer Thiel has acquired a reputation for the coherence of sound presented by its range of distinctive, sloping-baffle, floor-standing loudspeakers. Designer Jim Thiel gives a high priority to linearity of phase response; as a result, he chooses to use phase-linear, first-order crossovers in his designs, the target response being the combination of electrical and mechanical filtering. As the out-of-band rejection is then only 6dB/octave, it places demands on his chosen drive-units to be well-behaved, not only in their passbands, but also outside of them. In effect, the loudspeaker has to be designed as a whole system, the interaction between the drive-units and crossover being considerable.

One never knows, do one? Within the past year, I've had six preamplifiers in my system for critical evaluation, reviewing four of them and using another two as references. I was getting pretty tired of listening for sonic differences among preamps, and I told JA that I'd prefer my next reviewing assignment to be something different, like a speaker or a power amp. He agreed, but said he'd first like me to review just one more preamp, the Perfectionist Audio CPR/TIPS, which had been waiting patiently in the review queue in Santa Fe. Well, one more wouldn't hurt. Sounded kind of interesting, anyway: a preamp with a battery-operated power supply!

What was to have been the first Southern California-based T.H.E. Show organized without input from its late co-founder, Richard Beers, who died in 2016, has been postponed until 2018. The inaugural T.H.E. Show Anaheim, as the former T.H.E. Show Newport Beach is now called, was to have taken place September 22–24 at the Hilton Anaheim. The reasons for the late postponement are spelled out in a two-page letter to exhibitors, which was released on September 6 by Beers' close friend and long-time associate, Show President Maurice R. Jung.