Quote Originally Posted by emaidel View Post
Never - and I repeat, "never" - did I hear anyone ever say they could actually hear tonal differences as various instruments traversed the various drivers.
Wellllll, I'm gonna have to agree with him with provisos. First of all, I have always been a fan of the DQ-10. I worked for a hi-fi shop in the 70s and we sold lots of them. I've heard them stacked in an inverted configuration, too. A very popular amplifier used with them was Bongiorno's Ampzilla. While Jon Dahlquist was the chief designer, he had an assistant who worked on later designs and now has his own company - Nola. That is Carl Marchisotto. I've heard a range of his current products up to and including the Grand Reference and have great admiration for the legacy that began with the DQ-10.

The design was certainly ground breaking in the day with separate baffles for each driver to minimize diffraction and carefully selected crossover points to minimize changes in directivity. The only gotcha was that the Motorola piezo could be "spitty" with the wrong amp like a Crown. Where the JBL L-100 used a 5" midrange all the way up to 6 khz, where it noticeably beamed and created a weird soundstage, the DQ-10 ran its 5 incher only to 1 khz before transitioning to the dome midrange. Each driver was used in its optimum range.

On the other hand, we also sold Magnepan, Dayton-Wright and Acoustat. As my moniker suggests, I have always been drawn to the coherency of full range electrostats and have owned various models for the past 35 years. I will never forget hearing JWC's Dayton-Wrights for the first time back in '76. Truly, I find there is no substitute for a full range design when it comes to coherence. I hear the same issue to varying degrees with modern 4-5 ways as well. The range of the human voice spans three of the drivers while a piano spans them all.

However magically Jon "sewed" the drivers together, seams still exist - at least when compared to a speaker with similar bandwidth that has no seams. The Dahlquists, however, remain an excellent speaker in today's world.