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Audio enthusiasts the world over were saddened this week to learn that Jim Thiel, co-founder of Thiel Audio Products and its chief engineer for all of the company's 33-year history, has passed away. Thiel was known as one of the world's most talented and knowledgeable designers of high-end speakers. His creations have won so many Best of the Year awards from so many magazines and websites that it's probably impossible to count them all.

Although Thiel possessed the quiet, focused personality common to many engineers, he was known as a great conversationalist, and I found him to be a generous and valuable teacher.

My fondest memory of him comes from the first dinner we had together, near his company's headquarters in Lexington, Kentucky. I was visiting Thiel Audio to get a tour of the company's plant and investigate some problems I'd had measuring one of the company's speakers.

Among speaker cognoscenti, Thiel was perhaps best-known for his devotion to first-order (6 dB/octave) crossovers. I was nervous about having dinner with him because I had recently written an article outlining common problems with first-order crossovers, such as high tweeter distortion and poor dispersion. After an hour of fascinating technical conversation, I figured he must not have read the article and I was off the hook. But suddenly he stated, "I read that article you wrote about first-order crossovers...."

I cringed, waiting for him to point out some embarrassing technical error I'd made or just vent his frustration. But to my surprise, he continued, "...and I agree with everything you said."

Sensing my shock and relief, he explained, "What I'd like to show you while you're here is how we've overcome all those problems." The next day, he proceeded to make a believer out of me, letting my play Motley Crue's "Kickstart My Heart" through his latest top-of-the-line speaker (the CS 7, if memory serves) at levels I barely thought possible from a P.A. speaker, much less a home speaker, and much less a speaker with a first-order crossover. The demo ended when the dual Krell monoblock amplifiers pulled enough current from the wall to trip the circuit breaker.

I'll miss Jim Thiel and I know many thousands of audiophiles will, too.—Brent Butterworth