Thiel Owners

Your Bryston in bridged mode is not recommended for the low impedance of your speakers. In bridge mode, 8 ohm is recommended as minimum and your speakers go down to below 3 ohm. Keep them in unbridged mode and they will comfortably go down to 4 ohm and produce 200 + watt. Your amp would be great for bi amping though!

Ovinwar - the CS5 was Thiel's first application of in-house Finite Element Analysis, applied to all aspects of development. The original CS5 tweeter (also used in CS5.1, 3.6 and 2.2) was wholly developed in-house and represents a giant leap ahead, beyond what we could buy in the marketplace. The other drivers, MB dome upper mid, Focal lower mid and both Seas upper and lower woofers were the closest to our goals that we could get from those various suppliers. After introduction, we developed custom motor manufacturing which we applied to those non-tweeter drivers for considerably lower distortion and greater clarity.

Most CS5 owners upgraded to the CS5i, which might be available from Rob Gillum at Coherent Source Service. However that settles might influence the level of performance you seek in your ancillary gear. The CS5 was our state of the art, but the bar was raised significantly by the CS5i, which could justify ultra-performance signal purity.

Wow! Really appreciate all the responses. It is wonderful to be able to tap into so many knowledgeable resources. Really just getting started so I will be more active when I have something valuable to add. I don't listen really  loud, at least not too often, so the Bryston is going to need to be the starter amp, and the CS5 has no second lugs for biamping. My vandersteen's do, and they are powered by 2 Mitsubishi DA-15s vertically biamped. I just don't have any decent source equipment. Tons of CDs but my older transport wont spin- it has the pioneer stable platter, but cannot see an appropriate path for repair. I hate throwing away- everything else works, but economics will probably require. Thanks again.

Dsper
I have spent a great deal of time in Indy. Was a Colts season ticket holder until a few years ago. I recall Ovation as a big dealer in the area, but not familiar with the one you mentioned.

Has anyone here heard the dual CS5s used to create a dipole?  I remember Jim Thiel saying that putting two CS5 pairs back to back would provide greater listening improvement than bi-amping the beasts. 
I ask because I've recently been playing with my new toys, a  Bose 901 II system.  And while I've just taken the conversation from the sublime to the ridiculous, I have to admit that these little beasts sound a lot bigger and better than they ought to: they're not the most accurate speakers in the world but they are a whole lot of fun.  And I also found that the music is far less of a blurred mess than intuition would suggest. 

In a moment of insight or madness, I realized that the 901s are a highly equalized single driver system.  Not sure if that would make them time and phase coherent but there is no crossover to throw the signal out.  And I know that the 3.5s were phase coherent and used an equalizer so the 901 EQ wouldn't necessarily cause phase issues.  

This makes me wonder if phase coherence wasn't part of the secret sauce that made the 901s work in the first place.  The end result isn't a jumbled mess, it's a pretty impressive Technicolor rendition of the signal.   And if I'm right, two pairs of CS5s would give you that signal in Technicolor and 8k -- although you'd be spending a whole lot more on amplification :)