Thiel Owners

@thosb. I will add some updated pictures of the vintage room... like most speakers that reside there, some tweaks and changes required to get best of them...
so far the Thiel require more toe in than the Apogee Stage, Vandersteen 1ci or the Quad ESL. The Nakagoka 110 can be a bit tipped up so I swapped in a Grado Ref Platinum last eve... that fixed that... finally my heavily modified Audionics CC2 solid state amp does a better job on the low end....

all fun

more photos later...

the Thiel require more toe in than the Apogee Stage, Vandersteen 1ci or the Quad ESL.

My Vandersteen Sig IIs sounded best with a bit of toe-in but I like the sound of my CS2.4s without any toe-in. I have them just under 8’ apart and sit ~9’ away.

Ketchup makes a very good point. When I reviewed upgradible status for all the models, we nixed the 3.5 due to unavailability of drivers. As long as Rob can rebuild them, that is a safe and effective method of keeping your 3.5s on the air.
A further point of history is that the 3.5 was near the end of Thiel's "normal" driver use. The 3.5 used modified, European, best of form drivers of the day. We had adopted Finite Element Analysis and were developing more sophisticated driver motors, cone geometries and surrounds for greater dynamic range and transient precision.  By the following 3.6 generation, the drivers were completely engineered in-house and custom built to our specs by Vifa. Every driver is qualitatively more sophisticated in every way than those in the 3.5. So, as Ketchup warns, a lot of effort could be wasted trying to find replacement drivers that Thiel was not able to find. The 3.5 has a following. I vote to work with Rob for rebuilds.
I will not be hot-rodding the 3.5, but can recommend upgrade parts for anyone to install themselves.

Beetle - the amount of toe-in is highly dependent on the room. How wide is your room? With enough side space and absorption or diffraction at the first side reflection point, Thiel speakers are designed for straight-ahead positioning. Dropping off the direct tweeter axis smooths out the measured and heard tweeter response. In Thiel's 20' wide showroom, straight ahead sounded best for any and all models.

Unfortunately a rebuild of 3.5 drivers isn't always an option.  Mine came with replacement mids (mentioned above) and the originals are nowhere to be found.  So I would like to find a replacement that is close in spec to the original (which mine may be, hence the effort to confirm).  Simply waiting for a newer model to surface at a good price seems short-sighted to me as long as a suitable replacement can be sourced.  As they say, "it ain't love, but it ain't bad..."