Thiel Owners

Thiel has used the same internal wire since the 03 in 1978, before the time that wire became a component. We identified a high purity, long crystal, oxygen-free polished wire in teflon jacket, developed for the aerospace avionics industry. That wire, twisted at 2.5 per inch does the job in separate runs from input terminals to XO and XO to each driver, with no shared grounds, etc. The wire is a known component of the XO network, so all its factors are measured and listened to as system characteristics.

When ITT / Florida stopped making that wire, StraightWire developed an equally excellent source and Thiel used that exclusively going forward.

This internal wire is a different animal from amp to speaker cable runs which must be engineered without knowing source or load or ambient impedance, capacitance, length of run and so forth.

Hi Jon_5912, if the price is per pair, then the pricing makes complete sense to me!  I must have missed that point, so thanks for the clarification.    

Hi pops, thanks for sharing your experience with SW.  Very interesting indeed!  I haven't spent much time with cabling other than making sure it's sufficient gauge (all at least 10awg).  However, as I finalize all my components, I'm sure I'll reach the point where cables will be the last area I want to investigate.

Thank you Tom for your thoughts.  Your comments that the internal wire is a different animal from the amp-2-speaker one does make me want to revisit just going with SW without auditioning others.  Maybe I should just save up my money and go with Goertz AG3!  Can't argue with the equipment Jim used himself, at least as a starting point.  Do you happen to know why Jim didn't demo the 3.7s with Goertz, but used SW?  Is it because SW just offered to front the equipment and marketing?  Not sure how the industry works...

I have no actual knowledge of Goertz except that Jim used it in the lab as a reference quality cable. The industry works in many ways and each company develops its own value-style. Thiel valued long-term mutually sustaining relationships built on product, company and dealer synergies. In such relationships, the players share feedback and experience for mutual benefit. Thiel and SW worked this way for many decades. So it is no surprise they used each others' products or co-exhibited at shows.

I can't make product recommendations, because my personal experience is thin and very dated.