Thiel Owners

In case anyone is interested,
received the following email from Audio Consultants:

Audio Consultants Retirement Sale Continues

Dear Friends,

As you know, before we officially closed our doors on December 21st, we held a comprehensive sale and most of our vast inventory is gone.   However, a few interesting items remain.  Some of these include:

- 1 pair Vienna Acoustics Music, with crates

- 1 pair Vienna Acoustics Mozart Grand with boxes

- 1 pair Vienna Beethoven Concert Grand, with boxes

- HRS MXR double wide rack with platforms

- Various Salamander cabinets and racks

- Various Transparent cables

- 1 Solid Tech 20” high double wide rack

- 1 pair McIntosh HT3 dipole speakers

- 1 pair Klipsch RS7 speakers

- Critical Mass amp stands

- Grand Prix amp stands

- 1 pair Thiel SCS 3 speakers

To inquire about anything, please call 847 864 9565 or please stop in.  I will be in the store every day until about the end of January, probably from 10am to 4pm.

Thank you again.

Sincerely,

Simon Zreczny

^I just called, not particularly helpful. 

I am in complete agreement with Beetlemania. The core designs are what helped separate Thiel from the herd. It would be hard for a small company to market competing design principles and still maintain credibility. Grooming a replacement for Jim wouldn't be too easy. As the late Roy Johnson of Green Mountain used to say, most people aren't up to doing the math. There aren't that many with the chops and the will. It's one thing to put together a 1st order crossover in a slanted box , it's another to customize for driver anomalies so that the whole acts as a time coherent system. When I first got serious about auditioning speakers, and not understanding the reasons why, I kept coming back to the few time coherent designs (the maggies were the only exception even considered). To this day I am still consistently  attracted to time correct designs over all others. 

In response to Andy 2 "Monday Quarterbacking" I'll offer that over the 40 year Thiel sales history, perhaps 10% of their buyers knew what a first-order crossover was, its real benefits and challenges. And perhaps 1% of those buyers knew the engineering well enough to truly appreciate the technical aspects, as Tom touches on above. That's just a total guess knowing the hifi buying population I've engaged with over 45 years (not as a salesman).

I'm perhaps in the 1% above (NOT "the 1%"!) and it still came down to lots of listening in audio showrooms in the brick and mortar days to Thiels versus similarly priced and respected speakers. I had a preference for their engineering, but if they didn't appease my sound priorities vs all the other good speakers of the day anywhere near their price or form factor, I wouldn't have bought 2.3s, and later 2.4s. I had no trouble finding Thiels among many dealers throughout the northeast with which to compare to many other brands. They didn't seem a 'boutique' speaker to me at the time, splitting the difference between say B&W and oh I dunno, Silverline Audio.

Also, Thiels were generally getting good to great reviews over the years, with 'too bright' being the most common complaint I recall. Thiel's "real" designs of their final decade seemed the best-received.  So I don't agree that things would have been any different if Jim chose to use higher-order crossovers to 'save' the company, assuming the voicing, pricing, cabinetry, etc were otherwise similar. Doing so would dumb-down the brand for the 10% and have little perceivable difference in the showroom for the 90%.  Perhaps the bigger 'problem' was Jim's solo brilliance and unwillingness/difficulty in finding a suitable protege, ending up with perhaps the dumbest audio-related buyout I've ever been aware of :-(

I worked at a Thiel dealer in 1978/1979, so right you are Tom...people hear it or they don’t and first order slopes are difficult and require a lot of innovation and work. I also eventually worked selling Vandersteen and Dunlavey and of course others, many others.... I own a minty pair of Thiel and a couple pair of Vandersteen today - last man standing but with a succession plan, my hope is it works - they are certainly a small family centered business.
trade secret and move fast is a better strategy than patents for sure.
wishing you all the best in 2020!!!!