Thiel is no longer Thiel.
I was at CES 2014 and spoke with the new owners of Thiel and asked a lot of questions regarding speaker design, speaker models, and what the future holds for the company, and I must say I'm very disappointed from what I heard.
First off, the new TM series is NOTHING like any Thiel speaker you've ever seen. They had the T3 monitor on demo and the T1 on static display. Neither one uses aluminum diaphragms, a coaxial driver, short coil long gap motors, a sloped baffle, or first order crossovers... most of what have been part of Thiel almost since the beginning, and certainly what had made Thiel the great speaker company it had been up until Jim Thiel's passing. All of that is gone and will not be included in any speaker the company will be releasing this year.
Also gone is Gary (who is now with Bryston) who was essentially Jim's apprentice and who continued with his work & philosophy in speakers like the new CS2.7 and CS1.7. Other speaker models that he had been working on with others like the CS7.3 and MCS.2 (the MCS.2 was shown on static display at CES 2011) are no longer in development and will not come to market. Instead the new TM1 will be the new flagship and other models that will be released this year will include a new center channel, new in-walls, and a new line of sub-woofers.
I also asked if they will continue with the current models (CS3.7, CS2.7, etc...) since they are going with a completely new design philosophy and different speaker models and the new owners told me that "We will continue the sell those models as long as there is a demand", which tells me that they may not be around very long.
Thiel is no longer Thiel, and if Jim was still alive I'm not sure if he'd be happy with where his speaker company is now going. With as many changes there have been since the new owners came in, they might as well just change the name of the company to something else cause everything that made Thiel, and everything that defined Thiel is now gone.