If you are a regular reader of Hifistatement, you probably will have come across the name Thiele. But even if you don't, it’s most likely that you know or own a product that Helmut Thiele had a hand in creating. But it’s only with this very special tonearm that he steps into the limelight with his name as a manufacturer.

After four terms as a student of mechanical engineering, Helmut Thiele realized that this subject wouldn’t be his fulfilment. When he then discovered that much of what he enjoyed could be realized in the subject of industrial design, he not only changed his field of study, but also moved from the Ruhr University in Bochum to Krefeld - something the author, who finished his studies in the concrete desert of Bochum, could still envy today. In 1978, Helmut Thiele developed and designed a turntable as his thesis. He also sought for inspiration at the Audio Forum in Duisburg. On his first visit, he actually only wanted to stop by in the morning, but then stayed until closing time. The lively exchange with Alfred Rudolph led, among other things, to Helmut Thiele machining the prototypes of the first spherical horns for the ion tweeter out of bronze according to Rudolph’s drawings, handcrafting the first GRP horns for various midrange drivers and also building the bass horn for the first Excalibur speaker system. Helmut Thiele also created the design of the Michaelson & Austin M100 and the TVP-X preamplifier. At that time, Audio Forum or ATR respectively was the German distributor for the English tube specialists - and, by the way, the author was the proud owner of a TVA 1 at the time.

From the mid-80s, Helmut Thiele worked exclusively in a design office. About a decade later - he had become self-employed in the meantime - Karl-Heinz Fink asked him if he would design ALR's loudspeaker series: From 1995 onwards, commissions followed from Heco, Magnat, MacAudio, Castle and Tannoy, among others - to stay with loudspeaker manufacturers for once. From then on, his occupation for industry and hi-fi manufacturers was more or less balanced. In 2008, Helmut Thiele, Karl-Heinz Fink and Walter Fuchs developed the TD 309 for Thorens. At the High End 2009, the designer came across the Thales tonearm and immediately his own ideas for a pivoted linear tracking tonearm emerged: In his tonearm developments so far, resonance control and dissipation have always had the highest priority. And to achieve this, a tonearm tube of high rigidity that’s also force-fitting to the headshell was required. Implementing a bearing at this point was therefore not an option. The parallelogram necessary for an almost tangential tracking with its four points, which are relatively far apart from each other - the maximum tracking angle error of the TA01 is a vanishingly small value of 0.036 degrees -, had therefore to be moved completely to the end of the tonearm tube.