Well of course AN because they are supposed to be placed in corners get around shortcummings of soundstage width - it's as wide a soundstage as the room can provide. You are correct that front to back soundstage is superior with AN over the comparable slim lines I have directly compared with Paradigm and B&W. Plus these speakers require certain positioning to sound right and usually means 3 feet+ into the room and well away from side walls and not being too far apart before the sound becomes very directional.

I heard the 604S3 again at a different dealer with the speakers mor in the corners and well apart - the sound was truly abysmal. Not position friendly speakers - but that's fine if you as a consumer know this going in of course. But for people like myself who move around a fair bit or want to change my home decor - it would be a bigger issue for myself to have a speaker that can not just sound good in one particular position.

No one design issue like a wide baffle or the complimentary drivers are going to be the end all answer. I got into that already with someone on another forum when I mistakenly said or implied that the wide baffle designs was responsible for the superior bass Audio Note gets. I just went by the fact that so few speakers are currently using a wide baffle and made an assumption - my bad. But certainly I felt it was part of the reason because they also have typically less volume than most others at considerably higher internal volumes that have way way less bass at louder levels.

You say somewhere that They lied about the narrow baffles - well I disagree. Peter bought the competition's best available designs and tried to make them work - including the likes of Apogee. It his opinion and belief that those speakers have that sound characteristic. People can disagree with that but it is his honest belief and one I agree with after hearing some of the best examples of those "narrow" baffles they exhibit those characterists versus his speakers and why I went that route. That is an "Opinion" and it must be said there are many of those abound - if you disagree then he is a liar I guess to you - if you agree with him then he is the Audio God.

This is the problem really though isn't it. Because Audio Note is doing very very different things than the rest of the industry - then his approach goes against the rest of the industry - read the speaker reviews and they say he has gone against Celestian Wilson, B&W etc. So you are swimming upstream. If Peter Qvortrup is "Correct" whatever that ultimately means - then the rest of the industry must be "wrong."

Which side you end up taking will be how you hear it and that is going to be subjective. It is obvious where I sit because I have spent too many years listening to stuff that just doesn't sound "THAT" great to me. This is why I say if you're happy with what "IS" considered the "RIGHT" design alla Studio 100, N803, Totem Hawk etc then super duper for you. They don't do it for me.

I would just like to see people listen to these in the same room as the AN's is all instead of 100 versus somebody elses variation on the same general design.

Not the same front end gear of course because the Oto SE at $4k simply won't drive those others properly most likely. So I personally would like the person to choose amplification and a cd source at 10 times the price of whatever AN SET amp and AN CD player is being run. A Krell, Mark Levinson - whichever the person feels is the pinnacle of SS technology which will appropriately drive and not be blamed later as a culprit. After all SS is much superior to SET right? So the SET will serve as a handicap to the Audio Notes and so will their backward cd players that use no error correction. His backwards fighting the mainstream gear obviously has no shot especially on paper with the SET amp measurements so no one should be afraid of doing such a comparison.