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- Jan 27, 2019
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I'm sympathetic to that point of view.
However, anecdotally, I owned the flagship Thiel 3.7 speakers and then bought the slightly smaller Thiel 2.7s to replace them. The 2.7s are not much smaller, have close to the same frequency range, and use the same coax drivers. I had both speakers at my house to compare for a long time before I finally sold the 3.7s. While the 2.7s had the same general character, I constantly noted a slight lack of finesse compared to the 3.7s. By that I mean, the 3.7s sounded both a bit more finely detailed and "relaxed" and more revealing. So a vocal for instance, hard panned to the left speaker sound on the 3.7s like a bit more ambience around the voice had been dug out from the recording, with more fine timbral nuance, and the voice would float free of the speaker a little better. Generally the 3.7 would "disappear" better as an apparent sound source, so the soundstage just started at the plain of the speaker and proceeded straight back from there depending on the recording. Where the 2.7 would have a slight more of a U-shaped soundstage with the same recordings, such that images towards the sides would tend to "glom" in to the speakers just a little bit more.
It wasn't until later I found out that one of the main differences between those speakers is that the 3.7 had a top and front baffle made of thick aluminum to control resonances. So the drivers were mounted in that thick aluminum front. For the 2.7 to keep costs down they lost the aluminum top and used MDF for the baffle instead. I've wondered if that accounted for the differences I describe above.
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