Wooch

The result is in the sound. I could care less whether a company buys off the shelf drivers or builds their own. There is simply no inherent advantage either way unless one knows what they're doing. Totem used to buy all of their drivers from Dynaudio and they made first rate speakers. Now that they can no longer buy the rivers they have come up with an alternative which they claim is a superior driver (whch is convenient) and the high end dealers after hearing them are dropping them here.

There is no need to re-invent the wheel. SEAS, Scanspeak Vifa among others are noted for building the best speaker drivers available. This however does not mean you can go out and stick em in a box and suddenly you have great speakers.

On another forum Legacy was being ripped to shreds for incompetant designs by people more technically savy that I regarding flush mounting and midrange phase problems that while they use very high end drivers get mixed assessments. (some love em some hate em - what else is new).

Audio Note is not a huge company and Peter sold off his prior BIG company because it was too big to manage the way he wanted it. (Audible Innovations or Audible illusions I can't remember which but the company is stil around).

Every company comes out with "our way is best" terminology and the one you buy is the one you buy. Audio Note in many circles will be written off simply because they're proponants of SET amps and turntables. I would too if I had read about them before I heard them I must admit. But hey if a Set amp can produce wall shaking bass and prestine extended highs with articulation in the midband and a turntable can sound that good well you're forced to re-think what people tell you about SETs and turntables as well no they can actually produce bass and no they don't roll off highs. Difference is they might actually know how to build a proper set and the other guy may not.

Back to Paradigm...my comments are an illustration not an accusation that not everything the owner said should be bought into 100% just as I don't buy into everything Qvortrup says, though much of it makes sense does not make it right just something, "Compare by Contrast," that I had not considered before but is just as reasonable if not more so than other evaluation processes. When a conglomorate speaker maker changes their buying decisions it will most likely be a financial reason not one related to improving the product. BOTH of course COULD happen but it will ALWAYS be a financial reason first unless the speaker maker is losing piles of business and MUST improve or go under. Since I'm not a fan of their treble response generally my conclusion would be different from an owner's view. I have not heard their old designs so I can't say...but the Matrix series from B&W as an example is better IMO to the newer more marketed and "updated" Nautilus line. It's still good but a step backward in my and many B&W followers and owners' minds. Just because B&W claims it's better and produces a white paper and external reviews and "hype" does not produce a better speaker in all cases.

AN's approach will drive the price up because of the fact that they acquire and work to improve already made products. He bought several of the best of designs from Planars elecrostats, boxed designs ToneArms, Turntables, Carts etc found the best, in his opinion basic designs, and re-worked them to take them to the next level. He filtered through them and came down to the final choices. Snell, for speakers, of course is a huge name in the industry and the original Snell were the ones that put Peter Snell on the map and the only ones he actually designed...the rest is corporate profit making and inferior speakers at higher prices from beancounters.

Audio Note has made their stance and written in detail - And considering that their best speaker is still based of a Snell E and runs off of "out of time" SET amps and have a weird cd player based off the original and horrible Cd players with zero times oversampling...that system I heard despite all of that was better than the BEST B&W speaker system with the BEST Classe amplifiers money can buy...The Model Nautilus "snail" shaped speaker with those 8 big classe Monoblocks and cd player at a system cost of more than double. And that showed me that with all the technical savy and testing that B&W has at their disposal(the biggest high end speaker maker in the world) and all the engineers that Math changes every year still, IMO, didn't beat, basically, a suped up, ugly square box Snell from the 70s. Yes the B&W will probably extend to 100khz which might be great if I could hear past 20 and it might extend to 2hz which would be nice if i could hear below 20hz which is more likely I can't below 30hz anyway.

And Snell isn't the only one from the 70s. Quad still has diehard support as does Magnepan and probably a dozen others. As does B&W and of course Paradigm. I was the biggest B&W supporter around this forum and for a long time...but after hearing several of the lesser known companies over the last couple of years, B&W has dropped several pegs especially on their higher end models IMO. And I really want to hear the Zero quasi transmission line floorstanding speakers from AN at under 1kUS that are supposedly outstanding.