I find this question re "opposite of Thiel" to be a good one. It demonstrates how individual the pursuit is. Each designer / company brings their own values, perspectives, resources and vision to the task. And both the task and its historic and cultural contexts are sufficiently large and complex to allow huge variability of outcomes. Thiel was a tiny player, which may have helped it remain true to its calling, which was to produce and support Jim's vision of a thoroughly accurate transducer, equally honoring all musically relevant aspects - augmented by the contributions of the other founders.
I didn't notice Bose on the list. Even if nothing is truly an opposite, I think it fair to remember that Bose was greatly responsible for the emergence of high end, especially brick and mortar demonstration stores. Most of the operators I knew in the day cited Bose as their focus for entering the arena, with phrases like "there must be better than Bose" , "Bose doesn't cut it", "Hard to believe people think they want Bose" etc. The upstart young designers resented that the large majority of Bose's budget went to advertising and marketing rather than product development and other oddities of Bose's dominance.
A personal piece of history: Bose made Thiel cease and desist from using the number 2.2 for our second generation model 2, which we renamed the CS2 2, without the decimal point, garnering more publicity and support than any emerging company could ask for. I found it amusing in the 2000s after moving near Boston and knowing some guys who worked for Bose, that they used the Thiel CS3.5 as their laboratory reference standard for product development benchmarking. Now, isn't irony sweet?
