Thiel is officially closed!!

RIP jim and your great company, certainly once great! legendary really

Jim must have passed on some engineering as the 2.7s were completed (and I believe designed, or partially designed) after his death.

Good point. I think the CS2.4SE was Thiel's last project that was completed but maybe he had started on the CS2.7 before he passed? Would be interesting to hear the rest of the story.

As I’ve written about in the Thiel owners thread:

I’m not a Thiel-only guy by any means. I’ve owned all sorts of other brands of speakers I love, and I still own not only Thiel, but MBL, Spendor, Waveform, Monitor Audio, Hales.

They all do something great, but different.

But the Thiel 3.7s and 2.7s I’ve owned for a while now are about as close to the ideal as I think I’ve owned thus far, in terms of the things I love: timbral beauty and faithfulness, liveliness and drive, image density, soundstaging and just "disappearing" as a sound source. And their looks for my tastes are just about the perfect combination of traditional and contemporary, refined, elegant, with impeccable build quality and finish.

Before I got the slightly smaller 2.7s I went on a binge this year of trying to find a slightly smaller speaker to replace the 3.7s. I demoed the latest speakers from Audio Note, Raidho, Audio Physic, Harbeth, Paradigm (persona), Revel, Focal (from stand mounted to the Kanta), Monitor Audio, and others I’m sure I’m forgetting.

And every time I returned home from the demo and played the same tracks on the Thiel 3.7s my jaw would just drop again. I found every other speaker I’d auditioned had some excellent quality, but also some sticking point, usually some lumps somewhere in the frequency response or a sense of the cabinet at some points, etc. But the big 3.7s in my room truly disappear as sound sources from the top to the very bottom, with beautiful organic tonality, transient incisiveness, and a mammoth walls-gone soundstage filled with dense, air-moving images.

Every time it was like the Thiels were saying "This is what all those other speakers were trying to do." And I am still left with the feeling that, although of course speakers within the same range as the 3.7s will have their own virtues, in terms of what Jim Thiel accomplished in the sense of low perceived speaker distortion, and fidelity to the signal....he was far ahead enough that many speakers are still trying to catch up. He was just that good of an engineer!

The way people talk you'd think Jim Thiel knew he was going to get sick and die in his mid sixties.  He probably thought he had another decade or more left to figure out how to turn the company over.

@shadorne, as someone who has a very similar philosophy to yours and who also owns some big active ATCs, I can tell you that at least some Thiels really are great products.  I have a pair of 2 2s from the nineties and they are truly great for what they are.  They are just such a joy to listen to and were never terribly expensive.  I've also got a pair of 3.7s and they are a fantastic product.  I replaced a pair of b&w N802s with the Thiel 3.7s and I've been a little bit mad ever since.  The thiels are so unmistakably better.  Better bass, better midrange, better tweeter, better soundstage.  Just way better.  Why did I waste those years on B&Ws?  

I don't know if the first order crossovers are really important.  I suspect it was mainly Jim's passion to make great speakers rather than any particular design philosophy.  Whatever it was, man these things are great.  They won't play as loud as the ATCs and I'm sure if I wanted to do a lot of careful comparing I could find several things the ATCs do better but the Thiels are great.