Thiel PowerPoint 1.2 Product information

Brand: Thiel

Model: PowerPoint 1.2

Category: Soundbar speakers

Type: Product information

March 2002

Thiel PowerPoint Surface-Mount Loudspeakers

The biggest problem most people have with home theater is

not the size of the monitors (everybody wants a bigger TV)

or even the cost (those $10,000 plasma sets are flying out of

the stores). No, the sticking point for most people is where

to put all those extra speakers.

Actually, if you watch the home-porn on HGTV or read the

nesting press like Architectural Digest, you'd be forgiven for

thinking that, if left to their own devices, designers would just

as soon ban all loudspeakers from rooms.

Now, I'm an audiophile, myself. I figure, what's the point of

having floor space, if not to have a blank surface to put

speakers on? And if Anthony Powell opined that Books Do

Furnish A Room, I feel the same way about speakers. Why

heck, the most comfortable rooms I've ever been in have

been filled with books, records, and speakers. But then, no

room I've ever lived in is in the slightest danger of appearing

on the cover of Architectural Digest.

So what do you do if you have a designer room that you want

to use for home theater—or even if your room is already so

stuffed with speakers, books, and records that you have

nowhere to put any extra speakers?

Most people rely on in-wall or on-wall loudspeakers. However,

until recently, in-wall loudspeakers were pretty much aimed

at industrial applications such as restaurants, stores, malls,

and the like. They were more about disappearing than they

were about sounding good. That's changed in the last decade

or so, but in-walls are hard to review, so that's still a pretty

well-kept secret.

On-wall speakers have lagged behind the in-walls, simply

because they aren't as sexy. You've still got something that

looks like a speaker in the room, so designers avoid 'em

like the undead shun garlic. And speaker companies sort

of treat 'em like their ugly sisters—they include 'em in the

literature, but they don't introduce 'em to all their friends.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and

supreme experience if only one had a colored

pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

The Thiel PowerPoints are different, though. Boy, are they

different! First, Thiel is proud of 'em—in fact, Jim Thiel tells

me, strictly based on dollar amounts, they were the company's

No. 1 selling product last year.

Further, they're kind of sexy looking. They're wedge-shaped

—they look like a doorstop writ large. Mounted on a wall or

ceiling, they look more like modest bulges than like speakers

stuck on the wall. And they're paintable, so they blend in

even more than you might think—in fact, Thiel includes a

paint-mask, so you can conveniently paint the entire

PowerPoint, including the grille, without threatening the

speaker's coaxial driver.

Nor are the PowerPoints just an afterthought product,

added to the line to make it competitive. That's not the way

Jim Thiel works. One thing that has always distinguished

Thiel as a speaker line is the way it adheres to Jim's speaker-

building philosophies. There are certain features shared

by all Thiel products. Jim believes in time-aligned arrays,

which ensure that all of the drivers launch a music wave

simultaneously. He also believes that first-order crossovers,

which maintain the phase integrity of the musical signal

throughout the speaker’s entire frequency response, are

the only technically correct approach. And he thinks

that his crossovers must be constructed from the finest

components. And that speakers should be solidly built

and rigidly braced. So that's the way Jim builds all his

speakers—and to ensure that they're all as close to his idea

of perfection as possible, these days, Jim designs and

Product Review

Thiel Audio

PowerPoint Surface-Mount Loudspeakers

w w w. o n h o m e t h e a t e r. c o m

constructs all his own drivers in-house.

The PowerPoint features a custom-built driver based on the

coaxial driver Jim designed for his SCS3 multimedia speaker.

The 1" dome tweeter—the same one used in Thiel's

$13,500 CS7.2—is mounted coaxially with the woofer,

which is to say that it is located in the center of the woofer

cone so that its wave can launch at the same time as the

woofer's.

The tweeter uses a special magnet structure made of

neodymium magnets, which are expensive but extremely

powerful. These magnets give the speaker high output

capability and low distortion.

The 6.5" woofer uses the same two-layer diaphragm as the

SCS3. There is an aluminum layer bonded to a lightweight

cast polystyrene layer to ensure its rigidity. The cone has

a specially designed shallow flare to prevent it from acting

like a horn for the tweeter. (To get an idea why that's bad,

cup your hands around your mouth and speak—that's what

a horn does to a sound source.) However, the PowerPoint

places certain physical requirements on the driver—it needs

to keep quite close to the wall, so the SCS3's magnet

system had to be redesigned to employ higher-output

neodymium magnets in order to keep the driver's motor-

system compact.

Like all Thiel loudspeakers, the PowerPoints employ a

complex first-order network using many polypropylene and

polystyrene capacitors. "Well," Jim Thiel allows, "By our

standards, it's not really complex—it is just a two-way

design, after all. There are some small changes we had to

make because it's designed to use on a boundary, so we

had to correct for the emphasis you do get in the lower

midrange and bass regions."

Dancing on the ceiling . . .

The shell is thermo-formed 3/8"-thick plastic, heated and

vacuum-formed to its complex shape. It is rigidly braced

from the inside, so that the whole is quite inert. And small—

it's only 19.75"L x 12.25"W x 5.5"H.

And the PowerPoints cost $1300 each. That's a hefty price

tag for such a small speaker, but—packed with premium

parts, custom-built drivers and custom-built motor systems

—the PowerPoints aren't built like mass-produced products.

They're essentially cost-no-object devices built to optimize

performance in what other designers have deemed a

compromised situation.

It's obvious that Jim Thiel doesn't see it that way. "When

Kathy [Kathy Gornik, Thiel's president] said, 'We need an

on-wall.' I went, 'Ohhhhhhhh-kay,'" Thiel said. "Originally, I

just figured I'd take our coaxial driver and put it in a shallow

cabinet with the driver mounted parallel to the wall, like

all the other designs out there. I had some vague idea that

I'd taper the cabinet to the wall to minimize diffraction."

The results weren't pretty. Thiel continued, "We mocked

up something along those lines and we took the first

measurements and saw that there was a big hole in

the midrange caused by the reflection off the wall, even

though I'd tapered the cabinet into the wall. That caused

a cancellation where that distance equaled a quarter

wavelength. That cancellation created a 6dB hole smack in

the middle of the midrange and we just couldn't do that."

Then inspiration struck—instead of trying to create a speaker

that tried to compensate for its near-boundary location,

what if it exploited it? "I got the idea that, if I mounted

the driver close enough to the wall, and, if the driver was

mounted at a significant angle to the wall (in the case of the

PowerPoint, that angle is 45 degrees), at some higher

frequency the dispersion will become less than 45 degrees.

So, if you can get the driver close enough to the wall so

that the frequency that is cancelled is higher than the

frequencies that the driver can disperse at 45 degrees, then

you won't have a cancellation because the frequency

that would be cancelled is high enough that the driver is

not dispersing energy at that frequency at a wide-enough

angle to project energy against the wall.

"That was my idea—and it turned out to work really well.

The only complication in working it out was that, to get

the driver close enough to the wall, we had to build a really

shallow driver with a physically small magnet system. So

we had to use a neodymium magnet system and design

things a little differently."

Oh sure—it sounds so easy when he says it.

"Only then did we start appreciating that there's a h u g e b e n e f i t

in having the driver so close to the boundary that you

essentially have no reflection from the boundary. Also, by

having that driver at 45 degrees, there were advantages in

room coverage and dispersion of energy throughout the room.

w w w. o n h o m e t h e a t e r. c o m

"Those benefits were serendipitous—we didn't really

have them in mind going into the project and, since the

topology was developed in response to certain more

obvious considerations, it still didn't occur to us that the

design would offer these benefits. But when we listened to the

finished product we realized we had something really cool!"

Adieu tristesse / Bonjour tristesse / Tu es inscrite

dans les lignes du plafond.

(Farewell sadness / Good-day sadness / You are inscribed

in the lines of the ceiling …)

Really cool, eh? That's about right—the first time I heard my

system with five PowerPoints set up, I just kept giggling and

replaying parts of The Ghosts of Mars that sounded really

impressive. This says a lot about how well the Thiels

enveloped me with sound and not a whole heck of a lot

for the quality of the movie, which was so uncompelling, I

didn't mind interrupting it frequently.

But to be fair, I was having such a ball with the Thiels, I

probably would have done the same thing with a movie

that actually had characters I cared about. The five Thiels

created environments that were totally sonically believable.

Even though they're monopoles, and it's dipoles that are

supposed to disappear and generate sound that doesn't

seem to emanate from a specific location, the Thiels totally

disappeared.

Actually, as I went through my selection of greatest-DVD

surround-ambience hits, I came to the conclusion that I had

never heard a more immersive system in a home—

the sound rivaled the sort of envelopment I have only heard

in 42nd Street showcase cinemas.

I don't tend to revel in explosions, crashes, and giant lizard

stomps—although the Thiels do handle high-excursion

silly sound levels with great aplomb—I'm a bigger fan of

the subtle sounds that emulate real life. Stuff like the

rainfall and lightning taking place during Gene Hackman's

big quayside speech in Crimson Tide or the changes in

room acoustics as characters dash in and out of different

rooms in the Pentagon in Clear and Present Danger or the

simple sounds of the wind passing through the jungle in

the same film.

Jonathan Demme is the master of mise en scéne or the

setting up of the environment in which a film takes place.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in The Silence of the

Lambs, where every scene has the lived-in clutter and

individual touches that distinguish rooms in real life and

that movies and TV shows never get right. Places like the

autopsy lab where Clarisse discovers the Death's Head

moth or the victim's bedroom where Clarisse searches

for clues have the disarray and jumbled minutia of real

life. This attention to detail extends to the sonic landscape

of the film, and the film distinguishes between rooms with

a myriad of tiny sound cues. With the Thiels, shifts in

scene were almost dizzying, and the longer the camera

lingered in each environment, the more detail accrued. This

is precisely what surround sound is supposed to be like

and almost never is.

What the Thiels don't do is recreate deep bass. From about

75Hz to 20kHz, you couldn't ask for better response,

but below that, nada. Well, fine, that's what subwoofers are

for, but that puts the total system cost up there. I used the

Polk PSW650, which is not only quite reasonably priced at

$780, but a most effective partner to the Thiels. Rolling off

the Thiels at about 80Hz made it possible to seamlessly

blend the PowerPoints with the floor-mounted subwoofer.

When I spoke to Jim Thiel about his design process on

the PowerPoints, he almost apologetically suggested that I

listen to a pair of them as full-range speakers in a stereo

configuration. No need for apologies—they sounded fantastic!

Just as the 5.1 system was completely enveloping, the

two-channel system was practically holographic.

The men's chorus Chanticleer recently released a recording

of John Tavener's Lamentations and Praises [ Te l d e c

Classics 0927-41342-2], a specially commissioned work

for the group's 12 voices and a fascinating combination of

instruments and electronics: flute, bass trombone, string

quintet, tape, and a percussion section comprised of a

Byzantine monastery bell, Tibetan temple bowl, tam-tam,

simantron (a large wooden sounding-board struck with a

hammer), tubular bells, and timpani.

The composer describes Lamentations and Praises as a

"sequence of ikons" linked, as he explains in the score, "by

a corridor of music." Through the recording, laid down at

Skywalker Sound, the group essentially "stages" the work

by exploiting different acoustics for the various scenes and

connecting passages. The PowerPoints set me down in

the midst of the changing acoustic, cushioned in the soft

pillow of the reverberant sound of men's voices and the

shifting instrumental textures. What a fabulous experience.

w w w. o n h o m e t h e a t e r. c o m

In fact, as I told Jim Thiel, it was better soundstaging than

I had experienced with some very serious loudspeaker

systems. "In a way, these speakers image better than a

conventional floorstanding speaker," Jim explained,

"because you don't have any equivalent floor reflection. By

not having that boundary reflection to tell you the sound

source is a certain distance away, you are more transported

to the soundfield of the recording you're listening to." What

he said!

Talk about an acoustic ceiling . . .

The last complete home-theater speaker system I reviewed

consisted of the Polk LSi15, LSiC, LSi7, and PSW650—

a system that retails for just over $3900. A system comp r i s e d

of five Thiel PowerPoints and the Polk PSW650 retails for a

little over $7100.

Both systems were immersive and dynamic, but there were

noticeable differences between the two. The front three

Polks worked extremely well together and offered a greater

sense of slam in loud and clamorous scenes, but they

couldn't match the speaker-to-speaker timbral uniformity of

the three identical PowerPoints. Also, as good as the Polk

LSiC is, it contributes a mild "picket-fence" comb as you

pass your head from one side to the other. The wide

dispersion and identical dispersion pattern of the three front

channel PowerPoints' coaxial driver systems not only

avoids that, it almost avoids any indication of there being

three separate soundfields up front. From one wall to the

other, the sound is seamless.

The surround channels differ, as well. The Polk LSi7s are

monopoles, as are the PowerPoints, but the surround

e f fects coming from the Polks are far more speaker specific

than the same sounds from the Thiels.

Now the Polks are no different from most other monopole

speakers in this regard. While some people insist that

only dipoles deliver the properly diffuse soundfield that

movie-theater surround is known for, I've never been able to

summon any great degree of passion one way or the other

on the subject. I've heard great-sounding dipoles that

generated truly non-locatable diffuse soundfields, but I've

also known monopoles that performed just as convincingly.

The PowerPoints seemed to offer the best of both worlds,

however. While I never found the Polks unsatisfying in my

audition, I vastly preferred the atmospheric immersion the

PowerPoints were capable of. It sounded "real"-er.

As a surround system, the PowerPoint/PSW650 system

was the clear victor—albeit at nearly twice the price. Things

were on a much more equal footing when I compared the

LSi15s as a stereo pair to a stereo pair of PowerPoints. The

Thiels still had that seductive complete envelopment thang

going—I've seldom heard their equal at that trick at any

price. But the LSi15s present an amazingly seamless sonic

portrait that is difficult to fault—and sure enough, even the

coaxial PowerPoints were hard pressed to beat 'em at it.

Call it a draw.

However, the Polks had far more low end—and even lower

midrange—authority. The Thiels, like many stand-mounted

monitors, just don't have the low end to compete with Polk's

floorstanding bargains. Music has greater body and heft—

and sounds more believably anchored to this world—

with the LSi15s. And, just as with many minimonitors, the

Thiels achieve a great deal of their U-R-There holography

because they d o n ' t have to struggle with the bottom

few octaves. Some people prefer this sound to the more

r e a l i s t i c , but less detailed-sounding full-range reproduction

of a larger speaker.

On the other hand, unlike stand-mounted monitors or the

Polk LSi15, the Thiels offer that seductive sound without

occupying any valuable real estate on the floor, which

makes them all but invisible in the room. I almost said that's

something you can't buy at any price—except, of course,

you can buy it for the price of a pair of Thiel PowerPoints.

Can a muse of fire exist under a ceiling

of commerce?

The Thiel PowerPoints are speakers that were born of

necessity and—through Jim Thiel's design insights and T h i e l ' s

general construction integrity—overcame the conventional

shortcomings attributed to an entire class of loudspeakers.

That's a pretty amazing story in itself.

But they sound so good they actually turn the audio world,

ummm, upside down. Let me say this again: They almost

totally disappear once mounted to the ceiling and painted to

match it. They aren't inexpensive, but they are built to an

extremely high level. Considering that you're buying a custom-

molded enclosure with custom-built drivers and packed with

exotic electronic parts, their price doesn't seem out-of-line

at all.

w w w. o n h o m e t h e a t e r. c o m

And then, factor in the fact that you get all this and your

uncluttered House & Garden décor to boot. I call that a

bargain. I'm sold—maybe floors do have better uses than

holding up loudspeakers.

...Wes Phillips

[email protected]

w w w. o n h o m e t h e a t e r. c o m

Thiel PowerPoint Surface-Mount Loudspeakers

Price: $1300 USD each

Warranty: Ten years parts and labor.

Thiel Audio Products

1026 Nandino Boulevard Phone: (606) 254-9427

Lexington, Kentucky Fax: (606) 254-0075

40511 E-mail: [email protected]

USA Website: www.thielaudio.com

onhometheater.com is part of the SoundStage! Network

Published by:

Schneider Publishing Inc.

Box 20068, 390 Rideau Street,

Ottawa, ON K1N 9N5

Canada

Thiel PowerPoint 1.2 Product information

Brand: Thiel

Model: PowerPoint 1.2

Category: Soundbar speakers

Type: Product information

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Thiel PowerPoint 1.2 Product information

Thiel PowerPoint 1.2 Product information

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