search
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…
Another way of looking at a speaker's time coherence is to examine not its phase response as such, but the phase deviation left over when that due to the speaker's departure from a flat amplitude response is removed. In a minimum-phase system—one that has just the right amount of phase deviation for its frequency response—the phase and amplitude responses are related mathematically by the Hilbert Transform. Subtracting the Hilbert-transformed amplitude response from the measured phase response will leave what is called the "excess phase"; ie, the speaker's departure from a true minimum-phase…
Brian Damkroger wrote about the CS6 in October 2003 (Vol.26 No.10):
Over the course of the year that Trish and I have lived in our new home, I've been rebuilding my reference system a piece at a time. I've been more or less methodically working through different cable packages and combinations of electronics, experimenting with various racks and isolation systems, even tearing down and rearranging the room layout and treatments a number of times. But the heart of the search was always figuring out what to use as a reference speaker.
On paper, it was easy. I needed something simple, to…
Sidebar: Brian Damkroger's Associated Equipment
Analog source: VPI TNT Mk.V-HR turntable-tonearm, Grado Statement cartridge.
Digital sources: Burmester 001, Simaudio Moon Eclipse CD players.
Preamplifier: VAC CPA1 Mk.III.
Power amplifiers: VTL Ichiban & Mark Levinson No.20.6 monoblocks.
Cables: Speaker and interconnect: Nirvana S-X Ltd., Audience Au24, Nordost Valhalla, Monster Cable Sigma Retro. AC: Audience PowerChord.
Accessories: Finite Elemente Pagoda equipment rack, String Suspension Concepts equipment & loudspeaker feed, Immedia SSC footers; Nordost ECO3 and…
One day last year, my friend Larry and I were talking about our college-fraternity days and loudspeakers. Those were four of the best years of my life. Strong friendships were formed, and ever since, we've kept in touch with most of our fraternity's brothers-in-heart. Ours was not a jock house, nor was it the last bastion of rampant male sexuality—it was, after all, an MIT frat house. But it was full of music lovers who fell neatly into three camps: the California School owned JBL Decades, the New England School had Smaller Advents, and the Renegades boasted bootlegged Bose 901s (footnote 1…