The fascinating thing is that in South Korea where apartments are tiny - audiophiles buy massive speakers like Tannoy or the Altec VOTT while in North America where people have massive rooms they buy tiny ass little thumpers like any and all slim line designed tower with 4-6inch plastic woofers. It's no bloody wonder people rave about planars.

Tannoy isn't perfect - nothing is, but they do sound quite coherent and most of them are fuller range and fuller bodied and sound mostly "right."

It is so critical for a speaker to be able to convey the ebb and flow and three dimensionality of music and very few speakers really do it. The problem with some of the speakers you mention is a lack of top to bottom cohesiveness - it sounds like individual drivers pumping out their response curve - it's artificial though they often measure well - which illustrates how useful that all is.

Interestingly the big fat and OLD Voice of the Theater with good electronics and a careful set-up(which helps anything really) beat the ever loving snot out of a $20,000+ B&W Diamond 800 and it's not terribly close. But they are butt freaking ugly and this model was somewhat modified - take a look http://www.audioworld.com/audio-prod...7-loudspeaker/

They're going for about $4k these days new which isn't cheap and I didn't know they re-introduced them - and they're good in smallish to medium rooms apparently. There is an ability to create pressure and the "Thwack" of drum kits that speakers like the N801 and most other speakers don't possess. And they don't sound harsh or strident like most of the classic Klipsch speakers. I am investigating some other companies that are taking some of these HE approaches but getting a little more refinement out of them. I'd like to get an Altec in at some point but I may be taking a job overseas, again, which makes my review situation a little more complicated.

I am talking to a manufacturer who has recently made a HE horn based set-up and he is the owner of Quad and Magnepan 20s. I am interested to see if he can maintain what I like about panels while getting what I like about horns and managing the balancing act of not bringing their foibles. If he will send me the speakers for review it will be intriguing because they're also affordable.