Thiel Audio SCS4 Speakers and Bryston Separates System

There are some things too important to be compromised. Good friends, good food, and fine music come to mind. I love tasty food and certainly value my friends, and I also place good music high on that list. Not just the content of the music, but the quality with which it is reproduced. I consider anything less than the best sound to be a compromise. A fine music system recreates a musical performance right in front of the listener and delivers with it a sense of realism and accuracy. I tested the Thiel SCS4 bookshelf speakers with Bryston separates to find out if it rises to the level of a no-compromise system.

Thiel and Bryston are unrelated companies, other than the fact they both manufacture high-end audio gear. Pairing high-end speakers with just the right high-end electronic components can sometimes be tricky, but the combination of Thiel and Bryston produce a unique sound synergy.

Thiel Audio Products of Lexington, Kentucky has been a leading player in high-end speakers for the past 30 years and designs and builds their own speaker components. The Thiel SCS4 is a two-way full range bookshelf speaker designed as a stereo pair or for center channel or surround speakers in a home theater system. The SCS4 uses a single 6.5" metal diaphragm woofer with a coaxially mounted 1" tweeter. The coaxial orientation of the drivers' produce time-aligned sound from the woofer and tweeter with the goal of delivering a coherent listening experience. Sound coherency is a critical part of music reproduction that I will touch-on later.

Bryston, a Canadian company builds high-end consumer and professional audio components. They enjoy a strong reputation of sound quality and reliability. Their thick aluminum faceplates and solid construction suggest that Bryston amps, preamps and CD players are built to last. Bryston offers a 20-year transferable warranty on analog circuits, 5-years on digital circuits and 3-years on components with moving parts.

According to Bryston, the 2BSST, a stereo amp with 100 wpc, has become a classic since its intro as the 2B in 1979. It is part of Bryston's Squared Series components and has been updated with dual-mono construction (independent power supplies) and doubled filter capacitance in the output stage for deeper, tighter bass response.

The system is controlled by Bryston's BP-6 analog preamp, a fully discrete Class A design with no ICs and with all components wired directly to circuit boards rather than loose wiring. This minimizes wire interactions and variations in signal travel. The BP-6 is a straightforward analog preamp – a so-called 'straight wire with gain', an expression for a component that amplifies an audio signal but adds no sound coloration. There are three options for the BP-6: a moving magnet phono stage, a coaxial S/PDIF digital input and a basic remote control.

The BCD-1 CD Player features 192 kHz/24-bit Crystal DACs, 128x oversampling digital filters and a Class A analog output stage. The player includes balanced-line XLR and unbalanced-line RCA outputs and has independent analog and digital power supplies to minimize interference between circuits.

The Bryston/Thiel system delivers a strong sense of musicality and fidelity to the original performance. Outstanding transparency and resolution of subtle details elevate this system to a level of performance found in the best of the best systems. It exemplifies the reason high-end speakers and components exist. In short, the impression of the listener is sound coherency.

Sound coherency is an abstract concept to describe, yet easy to hear. It is, in my opinion, one of the most important characteristics of music reproduction yet one of the least discussed. It is not really measurable, except by human perception, but the dictionary defines coherence as intelligible, articulate and congruous, among other things. In the case of the Thiel SCS4 speakers the sense of sound coherency is achieved by concentrically aligning the voice coils of each speaker so that destructive interference between drivers is prevented and the sounds coming from the woofer and tweeter are time aligned allowing them to reach the ear simultaneously. A truly coherent speaker presents sound as if one is listening to a single speaker for all frequencies rather than multiple speakers mounted in different locations in an enclosure. I am a big fan of coaxially or concentrically mounted drivers because of their coherent sound qualities.

Although not the beastly heavy mass of some power amps I've reviewed, the 2BSST is a powerhouse. Not in the brute force sense, its strong capabilities are rooted in design. The 2BSST has an astronomical slew rate of 60 volts/per microsecond, a spec that measures how quickly an amp responds to an incoming signal, such as a cymbal crash or other transient impulse. The faster the response time, the more accurate the reproduction. While an amplifier must respond quickly to transient signals, it must also control the movement of the speaker and prevent overshoot or undershoot of the cone, a spec known as damping factor. The 2BSST has a damping factor of 500 @ 20 Hz, the highest I've seen. I'll be the first to say that specs don't predict sound quality, but they tell part of the story. Together, the Thiel speakers and Bryston electronics were very easy to listen to for long periods of time.

It's not just Melody Gardot's sultry vocals that brings to life her performance of "Baby I'm a Fool", although she does sultry very well - it's also the pinpoint definition and clarity of her vocals and the instrumentals. The overall balanced sound and palpable presence of her voice comes through clearly on the Thiel/Bryston system. It's the essence of transparency.

The resolution of fine musical details is what makes critical and casual listening enjoyable as I heard in Sara Ks "Trust Somebody". The sound of a small bell in this track is subtle, but unmistakably clear and detailed. The system conveys the weight and importance of the music and leaves me wanting nothing more.