Prof - check.
Roxy - I have pasted together a fairly valid narrative, albeit with large vaguenesses and some holes. Some of the story is recounted in Ted Green’s Strata-gee.com interview with me from around 2018; we’ve also covered some in these 220 pages. A full reckoning would take pages, so here are some highlights.
For lots of reasons, Thiel Audio had been slipping for several years. Jim had kept his cancer secret for 5 or so years, but it affected everything. It’s amazing that he produced such magnificent late work while fighting his terminal illness.
Jim died in September 2009, about a year after introducing the breakthrough CS3.7. He had also developed much of the CS1.7 with a star-plane woofer like the 3.7. But the 1.6 was still young in its life cycle, and he went working on an upgraded CS7.3 coax. I’ve been told (but don’t really know) that driver took the 2.4 passive coupling to a higher plane. Let’s say there was strong work in the pipeline and he hoped to attract a buyer with that work as part of the package. For lots of reasons that didn’t happen.
I’m not sure when Kathy had taken sales to Crutchfield, but I do know that was a huge bone of contention between Jim and Kathy. I don’t know much more except that the stellar Thiel dealer base was gone when I checked in. That was September 2012 at the finalization of the 2.7 which had been co-developed between the long-term Thiel team and a Canadian engineering outsource. That product would not have come from Jim, but was relatively easy picking using the extant 3.7 coax and nearly extant 2.4 woofer in a quasi 3.7 cabinet. I congratulate that product, but it doesn’t really fit his MO. Jim’s natural sequence would have been to develop a 7.3 which would have a 3.7 style coax, possibly with a passive coupling and certainly with smaller diameters (enabled by crossing to larger lower midrange) capable of upper extension past 30K, plus all star-plane lower drivers. Then, trickle-down that driver technology to the 2.5. My conjecture is he would have held by our normal numbering system rather than skipping to the x.7 nomenclature.
After Jim died, and the dealer base was limping, Kathy tried to carry on, but lacked the internal design-research chops. The development cost for the (relatively simple) 2.7 was over a $ quarter million, which was unsustainable for a rather lean company. On my 2012 visit, the factory was a ghost town with perhaps 5 people and no speakers being built. Kathy went shopping for a right buyer with considerable help from industry insiders. No proper buyer was found. The lookers either lacked belief in Jim’s design goals and/or saw and knew the extreme difficulty of actually pulling off true coherence. In 2012 a broker presented the New Thiel buyers and a deal was struck.
At that time something could have been salvaged from the legacy, but they lacked any audio experience and took every wrong turn in the book plus some of their own. Within weeks the last of the old team had been fired or resigned. In the five ensuing years, they went through 5 executive teams and spent about $10M on a sad circus.
Anybody can second-guess anybody else’s judgement. When the dust settled it was just a very hard job suited to a team of very astute insiders aligned with Jim’s goals and vision. None of that materialized.
