THIEL & PARTNER
Thiel & Partner have been producing and distributing high quality drivers made of stiff membrane materials such as Al²O³ ceramics, CVD-diamond and aluminium sandwich, under the accuton® brand since 1994.
We aim to provide of the best dynamic speaker drivers on the market.
We also provide our customers with extensive support and collaboration in areas like case construction, design of the crossover and implementation of electronic components.
To achieve our goal, we have set ourselves ambitious targets regarding customer, supplier and employee orientation and defined these as follows.
Our customers manufacture premium quality speakers for the high-end market. To support them as best we can, we not only provide the best drivers, we also co-operate closely in terms of the technical features and visual and haptic designs of their products.
To meet our objectives concerning customer orientation, we have selected the best suppliers on the market. We work together in a long-term and partnership-oriented manner in order to deliver technically and economically outstanding solutions for the benefit of our customers.
All of our employees are committed to our high quality objectives and work constructively to realize these. We communicate our corporate policy clearly to our employees and make the importance of customer and supplier orientation visible by putting our values into practice.
Furthermore, we organize annual employee meetings, in which development opportunities are discussed.
Ongoing training in organizational, economic and technical terms is the prerequisite for our company's success. Efficient work organization, error prevention and monitoring of our own performance are parts of the key building blocks of our quality management on a daily basis.
We reward constructive suggestions for product improvement and the simplification of work processes through a bonus system and a corresponding expansion of responsibilities. Mutual collaboration is supported by motivation, team spirit and a constructive attitude. As with our customers and suppliers, we communicate with our employees in a friendly manner and work together as a team. We value social competence, expertise and professional appearance. Our management fulfills its responsibility to demonstrate and communicate these corporate and quality goals, to guarantee their implementation and further development.
THE HISTORY OF THIEL & PARTNER GMBH
In 1984, Bernhard Thiel, a production engineer at Backes & Müller, invented a process for producing very thin sheets of extremely hard corundum (Al2O3), also known as sapphire. This patented process made it possible to produce very stiff, lightweight and highly damped loudspeaker cones. This new and very hard material allows for loudspeaker drivers with a wider bandwidth, lower distortion and a purer sound than ever before.
Initially, these ceramic drivers were produced exclusively for new Backes & Müller products, but a few years later Bernhard Thiel left B&M and founded his own company, the original Thiel GmbH in Homburg, Germany. His loudspeaker units - at that time only tweeters and midrange drivers - were quickly distributed in the audiophile world and gained a very high reputation for their sonic virtues. Soon these drivers were being used in many of today's high-end loudspeakers.
Backes & Müller, still Bernhard Thiel's main customer, went out of business in 1992. This, of course, created some major problems for the young Thiel GmbH. So Bernhard Thiel started looking for a partner to take care of the commercial side of the business. This partner was found in Adrian Bankewitz, at that time the European distributor of Accuton products and a long-time friend of Bernhard Thiel. He bought the assets of the old Thiel GmbH, put together the production and distribution channels and the new Thiel & Partner GmbH of today was born.
Since those early days, Accuton has experienced continuous growth and expansion.
An article in "Scientific American" in 1999 about the successful production of artificial diamond disks using a newly invented CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) process caught the attention of Adrian Bankewitz. Soon after, he established a joint project with the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Physics in Freiburg, Germany. The result was the first tweeter with a pure diamond diaphragm with an absolutely exceptional sound quality, which caught the attention of numerous high end loudspeaker manufacturers. Today, diamond loudspeaker drivers are sold worldwide and are the main source of revenue for Accuton. Diaphragms are available from 20mm to 90mm in diameter.
Not much later, we developed one of the first midrange drivers with a very large, underhung NdFeB magnet system and a titanium voice coil former, which also gained a distinct reputation for an unprecedented impulse response and phenomenal sound quality.
In 2012, we offered a share of the company to Dirk Vaehsen, an exceptionally skilled loudspeaker designer and engineer, who has since redesigned and improved the entire line of drivers we have produced to date. Of particular note is his line of "Cell" drivers, which for the first time ever, create a single acoustic center in the same plane for all of the drivers in a flat front plate.
In 2021, he was promoted to second CEO of Thiel and Partner - leading the company as successor of Adrian Bankewitz into the future.