Quote Originally Posted by RGA
In my view home theater has completely destroyed the quality of loudspeakers. It is precisely the point that they are trying to get better graphs by changing the way they measure and making a small footprint. This way they can stick 6 loudspeakers on a plane instead of two and sell six speakers instead of two - sound? Well since all the competitors do the same thing they all pretty much sound the same...and people go out and listen to an Energy and Paradigm and they both sound sorta the same - both use NRC too - or did.

I was a big B&W supporter for a long time but now that I've been hearing different design concepts and B&W to me is falling back...actually they are not falling back they were always there...I just never bothered to hear different KINDS of designs. Pretty much ALL the home theater set-ups are slim line designs with multiple drivers and a metal tweeter. I continue to recommend them because of budget but really I doubt I could stomach the thought of owning them long term.

Dynaudio's new SE might be kind of the price range along with VR...but then those two are not home theater first companies either nor do they use metal if memeory serves. both pluses IMO.

PSB used to not use metal...if that's still the case it's probably a bonus.

I guess what you like is what you like and I'm happy that you found soemthing you liked. However, I think its incorrect to say that speaker designers designing towers try and measure frequency differently. And I think aiming for a flat frequency curve is inherently a good thing as no frequency /range gets emphasized. But that doesn't mean that Paradigms, PSB, B&W all sound the same. Thats simply not true. You also mentioned that the ideal source is a point source and in that sense, tower designs are trying to achieve this by minimizing the width of a speaker.

I've never heard electrostats or planars before and I need to go down and listen to a pair just to see what their all about. But thats not everybody's cup of tea either. From what I've read, they give a very diffuse sound stage where as the regukar old drivers give a more
detailed stage in terms of depth..etc. BUt I have to listen for myself.

And your absolutely right. Lsiten to a speaker and ignore the design behind it. If it sounds good and its in one's pricve range, buy it.


I do have a question about cross-overs. I knowthey induce phase distortion because of the capactivce/inductive effects. But is it correct to say that they split up the signal? I was always under the impression that the signal gets filtered into its frequency components in series; ie full range in, (bass to woofer) and mid-high signals move on to the next filter stage where the mids get stripped from the signal and passsed to the mid leaving the highs to the tweeter.