Thiel Owners

@tomthiel, it appears that you’d settled on a path. That is most encouraging. The models you’d decided to start with are perhaps closest to my heart. Though I must admit that Jim’s last  co-axial drivers certainly have their appeal. Do you think your updated CS 5’s with simpler crossovers will ease the amplifier burden?  

Unsound - The wavy drivers are very exciting, and depending on how the future unfolds, I hope to work with them.
Regarding the CS5s, I doubt whether I can help the low impedance, which is baked in with those drivers. A dual input option would sequester the severe bass load to the woofer amp, to free the upper amp. But as you know, that solution requires additional amp investment. What I can address is the two bucket brigade delays for the two midrange drivers which insert 36 components in series with them. That delay can be directly achieved with physical driver offset by re-working the baffle. A veil will be lifted. Given more time in 1989, that 3-D baffle was my preferred solution.  As a historical note, I would have expected a CS5.2 after my departure in the mid 1990s, but that model was not further developed after the driver replacements for the CS5i.

tomthiel
Thank You for the kind words and recognition. I suspect like every Soul here, the enjoyment of hearing music on a better than mid-fi system is where my interest and passion resides. I lived with said mid-fi set up from 1988 to 2002. This was not a negative disposition for it left the door open to  consideration of higher fidelity. I was very fortunate to lived in close proximity to New Orleans pre- Katrina. One Spring Saturday, I set my compass to visit a gentleman named Jay Valentino whom operated an Audio shop outside of New Orleans. The experience was life changing to report the least, as we spent the afternoon,  auditioning many brands read about in the Audio press (I started my subscriptions to both Stereophile and The Absolute Sound magazines in Fall 1993). Jay was a gracious host and quite knowledgable in the Audio retail realm having cut his teeth working under Circuit City and Campo before venturing out on his own accord.The retail space was acoustically sound, a rare find, in so many brick-and-mortar operations. His talent for creating system synergy was on target.Refreshing. I walked away that day with a clear Path- buying  into entry level high end electronics. I learned to apply readings/teachings  into real-time demo sessions from 2002-2005 when Hurricane Kartrina shut his doors.Jay never really recovered his operation in the aftermath of it all.Later on in the Spring of 2011, I would be struck again by Audio lightning discovering a Thiel CS 2.4 loudspeaker - the  Experience was anything except subtle.
Happy Listening!

JA - Happy listening indeed . . . and for the right client in the right environment it isn't very subtle is it? What got us involved in making speakers was stories like yours, except in our beginning times the speaker part of your experience was pretty dim. We loved hearing of young folks, usually shopping for their first 'serious' music system, not knowing much of anything and being dumbstruck that music in the home could be so good. I remember customers who started with a pair of 02s ($200?) and went way up the line over a lifetime of enjoyment. We kept an 'ego file' and some late nights when things were really hard, we would sit in the front office and pull out some love letters describing how they had found Thiel, and what joy we had brought to their lives - and that's really what kept the midnight oil burning.