On the subject of the AN box design, I am curious about the concept. I have met and talked with a few folks who made insturments, strings mainly but dome precusion/drums also, and they all focused heavilly on the way the material they used focused the sound in a certain way. All said that different materials and shapes had different sounds so you tuned for that when building them. I am not an insturment maker/designer but It seems to me that if these guys are correct than any box design would inherently hvae some "sound" they would be tuned for. So trying to isolate and eliminate that sound would create an overall more "neutral" sound. That said, and if i am reading this correctly, why would trying to utilizing the box's "sound" as opposed to trying to "neutralize" the boxes sound be preferable? Aren't you fine tuning the sound toward a certain "type" rather than the neutrality I tend to lean so heavilly towards.
Maybe it's just me, but I want my crappy old 70' and 60's rock to sound the closest to the way they were recorded just as much as I want my old Gramaphone masters and newer recordings to sound. I would rather hear whats recorded as neutrally and accurately as possible and decide the music I enjoy more than I would like to decide what I enjoy listening to on a specific system. I know this is a pipe dream in many ways, nothing is that accurate or neutral. This has always been my approach to music. But maybe I am proceeding from a false assumption here. I always loved the Maggie sound and the ML sound nowdays partly due to what I percieved as maybe not as full a range but a less "colored" range or reproduction. Admittedly I auditioned some B&W 803's driven by Krell stuff last week and was floored by the tonality. They doubled in the deep base area some but were increadible for the 5k or so they sell for.
So am I stumbling blindly here or are you saying that the sound speakers recreat has to be non-neutral so plan on it rather than trying to eliminate it?
Your help is appreciated.