Thiel PowerPoint 1.2 Product Support Bulletin

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
PowerPoint Surface-Mount Loudspeakers
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
w w w. o n h o m e t h e a t e r. c o m
© Schneider Publishing Inc.
Product Review
Thiel Audio