Deutsch: Tell me more about the listening tests. Tchilinguirian: We do a number of different kinds of listening tests. We do mono listening, where we get a number of other speakers for comparison. We use about three speakers and then different listeners would go in, switch between them, and try to get a feel for the speakers' spectral balances. Is the high end cleaner? Is it faster? More detailed?
Deutsch: Is this a blind test?
Tchilinguirian: Yes. The person listening doesn't know what's behind the screen. They write down their comments and evaluate the speaker on…
Deutsch: Do you use your own measuring systems exclusively? Or do you also use some of the commercially available systems? Tchilinguirian: We've got MLSSA, Brüel & Kjaer, and LMS, so we've got virtually every commercial system.
Deutsch: Which do you find most useful?
Tchilinguirian: Ours! I'm not saying this because I'm biased, but it's very quick. When you can look at all that information simultaneously, it saves time in having to go and turn the speaker and measure, turn and measure, etc. Our measurement system has eight channels, so you can look at eight curves…
Tchilinguirian: Yes. Our aim was not to develop a refrigerator that dominated the room and was very difficult to place. We wanted it as a lifestyle product that could go into a lot of homes and integrate well with a lot of different rooms. That's one of the tradeoffs, I guess. Deutsch: Were you aiming for a particular price range when the design started out?
Tchilinguirian: It was a price range between $5000 and $6500.
Deutsch: But you knew you weren't building a $10,000 speaker.
Tchilinguirian: Right. Nevertheless, we wanted the [speaker's] performance to compete…
Tchilinguirian: It's not a DSP, but there will be a later DSP version of it. It's an analog device, and it allows the user to integrate the subwoofer and satellite, no matter what the satellite is. There are a number of adjustable controls: the crossover point, phase of the satellite, and the most important that I found in listening to and playing with it—the ability of adjusting the knee of both the low- and high-pass sections. The rate of rolloff is always 24dB/octave, but the Q of the knee just before the rolloff is adjustable, so you can tune the knee to get maximally flat rolloffs at…
A reviewer's life is not all fame and fortune. There are downsides, too, one of which is that, while many great-sounding components pass through your listening room, only a few get to stay there on anything like a permanent basis. (And that involves money changing hands, as in [gasp!] "purchase.") Before I bought my long-term reference loudspeakers—a pair of B&W John Bowers Silver Signatures—back in 1994, the speakers that had spent the most time in my 2900-cubic foot listening room were a pair of Thiel CS2 2s. I reviewed the '2 2 in the January 1993 issue of Stereophile (Vol.16 No.1),…
Encouraged, I took the CS6es home to replace the B&Ws in my listening room. After some setup experimentation, I put on "Born Under a Bad Sign" from Jimi Hendrix's Blues (MCA MCAD-11060). "Great bass!" I scribbled down on my pad. The combination of Billy Cox's Fender bass and Buddy Miles' kickdrum, while not reaching that low in frequency, had excellent definition, coupled with a tremendous punch and body that I was not used to from the comparatively polite B&Ws. I put on the channel-phasing tracks from Stereophile's Test CD 2, on which I play the "Bad Sign" riff on my own Fender P-…
Sidebar 1: Specifications Description: Three-way, floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) aluminum-dome tweeter with a coaxial 4" (102mm) midrange unit with an aluminum/Styrofoam cone; 10" (254mm) aluminum-cone woofer; 12" (300mm) passive radiator. Crossover frequencies: Not specified. Crossover slopes: Acoustic first-order, 6dB/octave. Frequency response: 28Hz-28kHz, ±3dB. Phase response: minimum phase, ±10 degrees. Sensitivity: 86dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 4 ohms (2.3 ohms minimum). Recommended power: 100-400W.
Dimensions: 50" (1270mm) H by 13" (330mm) W by 18.5" (…
Sidebar 2: System and Setup The big Thiels were auditioned both in my dedicated listening room and in the Stereophile listening room. In my room, the speakers ended up about 36" from the rear wall (which is faced with books and LPs) and approximately 60" from the side walls (which also have bookshelves covering some of their surfaces). The speakers were toed-in slightly, but not all the way to the listening position. In my room, the digital source was either a Mark Levinson No.30.5 HDCD D/A processor driven by a Mark Levinson No.31.5 transport via an Illuminati AES/EBU cable, or Wadia…
Sidebar 3: Measurements My estimate of the CS6's B-weighted sensitivity was a little higher than specified, at 88dB/2.83V/1m. As is typical of Jim Thiel designs, however, the CS6's impedance is low; fig.1 reveals that it stays below 4 ohms over almost the entire audio band, and drops to a minimum value of 2.54 ohms at 8kHz. As is also typical of Jim Thiel speakers, the electrical phase angle is low as well, reducing the effect of the CS6's low impedance on the partnering amplifier. Like a reflex port, the tuning of the passive radiator is revealed by the "saddle" in the magnitude curve…
About that apparent upper-midrange suckout, which I imagine correlates with the reticence I perceived in my auditioning: This graph was taken on the tweeter axis, which is a reasonable 37" from the floor when the spikes are used. Fig.4, which shows the changes in response to be expected as the microphone is moved above or below the tweeter axis, reveals that the suckout fills in below the tweeter but gets very much worse for standing listeners. It's possible that the CS6 will not be so fussy about listening axis in large rooms, but in small rooms such as mine, sitting low or tilting the…
