Thiel Owners

Your description of the Maestro sounds very sophisticated. I don't see it in their present offerings. Steve has told me that they no longer use individually coated wires due to centering difficulty, expense, etc. Their present core technology is to compress the bare copper wires to maximize and unify contact, then insulating those groupings and applying their various cable geometries. My StraightWire is way down the line at Octave which utilizes their core compression technology, their insulation mix, geometry, etc. He characterized the Octave II (now III) as most of their available performance before climbing the cost ladder of 'designer sound'.

I don't remember which SW cable we had at Thiel when I left. I do know that the music room was outfitted with the Kimber Black Pearl when I auditioned the 3.7 vs nearly finalized 2.7 in 2012. Those cables are astounding - at $5 figures.

tomthiel

Do you know the current SW catalog? Entry level to Top Tier?

Happy Listening!

tomthiel

Thank You for citing Kimber Balck Pearl. This one slipped under my Radar.

I was thinking that Kimber Select (KS) is/was the Top line? Exciting times at Thiel circa 2012 with Models CS 2.7 and CS 3.7 loudspeakers.

Happy Listening!

Kimber Black Pearl : Corrected.

Kimber discontinued the Black Pearl due to time consumption and production requirements that couldn't be sustained at any asking price. Ray had gifted a first-run pair to us around 1980 and later traded them for a last-run finalized version. He, of course, used our speakers in his development work.

I was honored and pleased to evaluate the finalized CS2.7 even though I was not involved in its development. I saw the careful and sustained work of Team Thiel to bring that product to market in Jim's honor.