Prof - My knowledge is fairly peripheral and indirect; and those in the fray are pretty mum. General PTSD or some derivative. I had visited shortly before the sale, and it was very clear that a sale was necessary. I knew when Bob Brown, former executive at Boston Acoustics, was hired to ’run things’. Bob brought in Steve DeFuria, an early Thiel dealer and long-time company supporter and advocate. Steve made contact with me and I stayed apprised of some inside workings.
Kathy was fired almost immediately. Dawn fell soon after. Rob and Gary remained as well as off-site Micah as longtime publicist. My information came through Steve.
Mark Mason was a protege of Paul Barton (PSB), thoroughly colonized by the Dr. Toole school of design and engineering. Mark convinced Steve that what Jim was doing was misguided, and Steve tried to convince me so. I hold Steve greatly responsible for the change of course because he purported to be an inside track, operative back to the beginning - an assessment beyond the realities.
My read on your questions is that most / all of the carry-over personnel were chagrined. I believe staff was reduced to perhaps 5, and those that balked were ’gone’, so those who wanted to stay kept their heads low. Bob Brown told me that he was ’invisibilized / shunned’ for expressing support of Thiel’s place in the industry, and its unique approach and technologies that put it there.
The third-fourth CEO had real executive experience (with Proctor & Gamble) and kept me apprised (and wanted me onboard.) He said the (principal) owner was ’very difficult’ and that his interests leaned toward the Nashville glitter scene with no real knowledge of audio, especially high-performance nichemanship. He brought in a very knowledgeable design engineer from JBL who explored reviving the .7 concepts, and determined that the difficulties and expense were prohibitive, due primarily to Bob Thomas (first CEO) having trashed Thiel’s driver production when (rashly) moving to Nashville. Also, all Jim’s (very meticulous) records were MIA. My thorough search for them prooved inconclusive, including a core insider telling me she wouldn’t talk to me to ’keep anyone from being hurt’. Functionally, those records are gone / not accessible, whether or not they factually exist. I have dropped that very time and energy consuming quest.
Mark Mason’s TT1 series was chosen because the new ownership believed they would be correcting Jim’s misguided sidetrack down the coherence dead-end. I’ve been told that a fairly extensive world-wide search over a number of years before Jim’s death never turned up a successor designer both qualified and amenable to carrying on Jim’s work. Coherence requires qualitatively more chops than non-coherent solutions. That’s a deep well which I have been drinking from since 2018, and especially 2020 when I settled my purchase of Thiel’s residual assets.
The whole mess seems somehow avoidable looking from the outside. But from the inside, Jim couldn’t conceive of or execute working with peers. In his perspective, Thiel Audio was his playground for as long as he could play in it. A present collaborator and previous insider recently told me "Jim was the man, the rest of us were seen as lackies - very willing lackies glad to carry all the water we could."
Cheers, Tom