Japanese Audio???

[Ajani]

RGA, just keeping up with the posts and trying to read objectively, it seems if one changes the drivers, crossovers and cabinet, there isn't a lot left to resemble the original speaker. Especially in sound. I've only heard one pair of Snell, about 15 years ago. Probably not true Snell. I remember they did sound better than the Paradigm at the time. So I'm thinking they must not be so bad. I also wonder where Snell is today in the market. None of the Denon dealers carry them around here. Are they still in business?

It's a shame Vandersteen has to go to $45k to make a speaker that sounds good. I'll have to take your word for that. I'll also try to keep an open mind that some day I might hear a Klipsch I can tolerate. It's not only the sound but after having a pair of their towers in my home for an audition really made me lose respect for Klipsch. I believe they were in the RF line, a tower with two 10's and a horn. Not only did they completely go into distortion with good clean amplification at high volume, a look into the large port revealed minimal internal bracing at best, cheap cap for crossover and almost no damping material. Hopefully, this treatment doesn't stretch across all their models.

That's actually exactly what I thought... After having the design for over 30 years and making all those changes, they should be all Audio Note and not Snell by this point...

[RGA]

That's actually exactly what I thought... After having the design for over 30 years and making all those changes, they should be all Audio Note and not Snell by this point...

It's all how you look at it - yes the speakers are now Audio Note - they bought the rights and Peter Snell is dead. But as with most speaker designs someone copied something from someone and then improved it to make it better. The AN E box design was created by Acoustics engineer and opera house designer L.L. Beranek in 1940. Snell took it and created the Wave Launch approach. Audio Note took the Snell and supercharged it. The cabinet dimensions are exactly the same as the L.L. Beranek model. The Snell wave launch and matching system has been kept. But AN has been trying to make it better and better to extract more and more of what is possible from that cabinet. But that is NOT a single manufacturer approach - they do a lot of it but they get help from the engineers and experts past and present. You could say that the AN E is an Snell/Audio Note co-effort - but it would be wrong not to have Snell or LL Beranek as the major parts of the deal - without them there would not be an AN E. And if Snell lived he may have made much better speakers than the AN E. Peter Qvortrup said that he believes had Snell lived he would have made better loudspeakers that what Audio Note is capable of doing. So I think you can't just write off Peter Snell.