halifax - I understand your unease about the visually sloppy work. However, the boards look totally right to me. Those are classic Thiel brands and layout. Later 2.4s went to China on PC boards, and some had poorly made coils. I like the sound of the Thiel boards better than FSC/Chinese.
Acousta-coil was Thiel’s long-term supplier. In fact I introduced aerospace (6-9s) wire to them for the 03 in 1978 and Acousta-Coil and StraightWire built their businesses around us and that wire. The purity is as good as it gets, although over the years the top wire declined to 4-9s); the winding aspect ratio is correct as is the oven-baked binding varnish.
Those yellow Elpac caps were developed in 1988 for the CS5 and remained in all Thiel products until that original German film was gone.We bought and used over 100,000 of those tin foil and styrene film 1uF caps. Aeon is Solen’s Asian manufactured line. Thiel kept French Solens’ in its upper end and used the Aeon clones in the lower models. Those resistors are non-inductives that Jim developed around 1983 for the CS3. They are the performance weak link (IMO), and can be replaced if you wish with equal value Mills MRA-12s. We can talk about doubling some of them.
I would speculate that one of the boards was built by a less experienced technician, but both should perform equally well. Those early hard-wired boards with classic components are higher performing than later PCBs with various asian components.
