Sandy - thank you for your remembrances. The 03a was the real beginning of it all. It upgraded the 03, which was Thiel's shortest run in history: one year. The 03 was our first product to address time / phase with first order slopes. We struggled nearly two years to minimize all the problems which coherence made glaringly obvious, but which melted into obscurity with higher-order crossovers. We launched the 03 in early 1978 to an encouraging audience at the Winter CES in Chicago. But back home, we were still working around the clock to identify and solve "problems".
A root problem turned out to be diffraction, which wasn't much on the radar in 1978. We nested the drivers in heavy wool felt, and brought them closer together, virtually transforming the speaker, without changing the drivers or the crossover. By the end of the year we had the 'a' iteration which we introduced at January CES 1979. The illustrious Harry Pearson, editor of Absolute Sound and to many minds the founder of "high-end", gave the 03a a glowing review, citing its many unique strengths and only its ultimate power handling capability and his unease about the equalizer as his mild reservations. He finished with something like "Thiel's 03a is a tour de force; I expect to hear more from this emerging designer." That is a paraphrase from memory.
I suspect you're right about the early 80s at Havens and Hardesty because the CS3 was introduced January 1983. Here's a quiz for the group. Has anyone ever heard of the 03b?
