TAS: When did you discover high-end audio?

Jim Thiel: I was an enthusiast from the engineering point of view since high school in the early 1960s. There was always an appreciation for music in my family. My father was a musician and I took piano lessons at an early age.

TAS: Why did you decide to specialize in loudspeakers?

Jim Thiel: Although I always built loudspeakers, I was actually more experienced with electronics. However, I wanted to start my own business, and rightly or wrongly I thought it would be easier to build a successful audio company in the speaker industry than the electronics industry. I thought I could build speakers that were better enough that the average enthusiast could easily hear the difference

TAS: What were you hearing that you thought you could improve?

Jim Thiel: I was always interested in the sonic truth, and I was often disappointed with many (more…)

TAS: Did you have any idea that Famous Blue Raincoat was going to become an audiophile-grade recording?

Jennifer Warnes: No. I didn’t even know what one was.

TAS: Why do you think it sounds as good as it does?

Jennifer Warnes: Sensitive people whose antennae are up high hear birds differently than people who aren’t really listening—and everything else in life, as well. If you couple that with having grown up inside of orchestras, bands, and choirs, you grow fond of the honest sound. So Roscoe Beck and I made a pact that we’d (more…)

TAS: Was high-end audio always a passion for you?

Julien Pelchat: I remember when I was probably about four years old my younger brother, who’s also an audiophile, had a teddy bear with a music box inside and a winding crank. We were so fascinated by it that we actually destroyed it getting inside. I think that was the beginning.

TAS: And your first great stereo?

Julien Pelchat: At 19, I got my first real system and it was pretty substantial. At the time I was doing sound reinforcement for friends who were in rock bands, so I bought a pair of JBL 4520 horn-loaded loudspeakers, bi-amping these with Harman Citation amps—the Model 12 for the mid-highs and the Model 16 for the bass—using a JBL active crossover. Also, a Revox openreel recorder and a Technics turntable.

TAS: That’s a lot of “reinforcement.”

Julien Pelchat: The idea behind that is if I wanted to reproduce (more…)

TAS: When did you first become aware of high-end audio?

Lars Worre: I think I was probably eleven. My first experience was actually tape recording, using a Tandberg reel-to-reel and running around with one or two microphones. I was amazed at how much you could do to improve sound recording. That was all I had to work with, but I always thought it was good acoustical training, because it gave you a feel for stuff like reflections and boundaries and what they do to the sound.

TAS: Was there a particular system that you dreamed of?

Lars Worre: Three or four systems. One of them was Quad ESLs. I totally flipped over the way a simple choir was reproduced, the clarity. Prior to that, it was a pair of MartinLogan CLSes—the old ones with the wood frame and no electrodynamic woofer.

TAS: A difficult speaker to drive.

Lars Worre: And to set up. But I heard them under good conditions, and I would say that those and the Quad 63s did something…they could make this huge sound image. But the real point was the timing of the upper bass and the lower midrange fundamentals. The impact of each fundamental tone was intact. It’s the impact you get when you are in front of something live— not loudness but a transient response that’s much lower in frequency than normally revealed by electrodynamic speakers because it’s so hard to reproduce. Also I should add the first Snell Acoustics Type A, developed by the late Peter Snell. In my recollection, this speaker told me that it was possible to make one speaker that would be almost perfect in all aspects, without taking one virtue to the extremes and sacrificing the others. I think Peter Snell could have taken it far, had he been here for a longer time.

TAS: What’s the greater challenge, designing a Megaline or a Mentor?

Lars Worre: Frankly, it’s easier to do a Megaline than a Mentor. The challenge with the inexpensive speaker is greater, because you start out with something that’s basically not ideal and a tighter budget, so you need to be creative and work harder to achieve the best compromise—and that’s the art of developing the best speaker, the best compromise. I have great respect for designers that create entry-level speakers that sound great at $200.

TAS: Are you still spinning records?

Lars Worre: I’m not an analog freak, but I’m of the opinion that it’s often good to refer to what analog can do. On the other hand, you don’t have to listen to analog for a long time to realize what digital can also do. It’s not really a religion with me; both worlds have something to say.

TAS: What kind of music do you like to listen to when you’re voicing speakers?

Lars Worre: I’m very much into Bach piano music—quite a narrow niche. And I’m a big fan of Glenn Gould. When it comes to jazz, I have a particular weakness for stuff like Duke Ellington/Johnny Hodges on the good old Back to Back and Side by Side albums, along with most of Dave Brubeck’s recordings.

TAS: What kind of speakers will we be listening to in the next 10 years?

Lars Worre: For speakers, DSP-controlled. I can’t tell you whether it will be a very sophisticated room-correction system or just a system that will try to fix maybe 50% of the well known basic problems of the drivers. But I’m pretty certain that some kind of signal processing will be used to handle some of the bigger artifacts of a speaker in the room.

TAS: What kind of source player?

Lars Worre: A ROM of some sort. Probably an electronic ROM without any spinning device.

TAS: No hard drive?

Lars Worre: I don’t think it will be necessary. A standard ROM is quick enough to play things in high resolution. I think you can almost do that from a high-speed SD card today, and they cost almost nothing.

TAS: What’s your best advice for someone trying to assemble a component system?

Lars Worre: Even if I wasn’t in the speaker business this would be my advice: Start off with a good pair of speakers and at the same time a very good power amp. There are a lot more examples of mismatches between power amps and speakers than any other components.

TAS: What still inspires you?

Lars Worre: What I really like to see are people who are not part of the high end just sit down and listen to good music on a good system. They are shocked at how well reproduced sound can be. Just give me ten minutes of their time, and I know I can draw them into this world.