JCHussey- I would like to address your CS3s. This model is the de-facto watershed that put Thiel on a solid road to success. The CS3.5 gets more respect, but it is essentially the same speaker with a better midrange driver.
Taken together, the CS3/3.5 were designed before we adopted CNC machining, so more of the cabinet stiffness is in the walls with far fewer braces. The woofer and tweeter are the same and the cabinets have the same volume. Only the baffle angle is a little different due to different midrange acoustic centers and bringing the upper drivers closer together.
The CS3 & 3.5 are fraternal twins; any upgrades developed for those products will apply to both.
The sculpted baffle is a sharp point of Thiel history, and arguably responsible for Thiel’s survival. In the model 03a we had developed thick wool felt around the midrange and tweeter to attenuate diffraction. It worked well, was affordable; but looked less than elegant with the grilles removed. The curved baffle of the CS3 solved the problem elegantly but cost more. In 1982 we were a garage-shop operation. Our sell prices were cost-plus over an unrealistically low dirt-floor low overhead production cost. We needed to break out of me-too boxes to attract more sophisticated customers. My solution was to sculpt these 3-D baffles with ordinary shop tools, some ingenuity and lots of grunt. (We took an 8mm home movie of the process, which may emerge someday.) It goes like this.
Laminate MDF, route the driver mounts with templates, saw 3 x 45° facets with a progressive fixture on a tablesaw. Finish the conical roll-overs with a hand plane, rasp and sandpaper, then apply a wood-flour x drying oil slurry to fill the pores. I sculpted every baffle with one assistant.
One reason the CS3 put us on the map was timing. There was a deep recession in 1981-2 which killed many companies, and most of the survivors came to 1983 CES with re-warmed makeover products. We showed up with the CS3 that looked pretty high-tech / high-investment. It really got noticed.
From behind the curtain of time: Jim wasn’t convinced that "the market" would pay the price for that sculpted baffle. He co-developed an 03b using the same CS3 drivers, but with the 03a felt block diffraction-control baffle. Its introductory price would be $1150/pair @ 15% above the $990 03a. CES pre-show setup day response to the CS3 was so enthusiastic that the 03b never saw daylight. Jim, Kathy and I struggled till the wee hours to settle on the target price of $1850/pair, which J&K rolled back to $1750 at market production. We had broken out.
I consider the CS3/3.5 as the most lucid embodiment of Jim’s vision. This is the model I most want to recreate applying the technologies he continued to invent and refine through the rest of his career.
