Dunlavy SC IVa or B&W 802

curious how people have their IV-A's or V's set up and in what room sizes....I have my IV-A's about 11 feet apart and toed in a bit, listening position is around 12.5 feet away. Room is 20x23x10.5

The room is 17'-6" x 13'-4" x 8'-0". I have set the speakers on the long wall as recommended by the speaker manufacturer. The tweeters are placed 2'-8" (approx. 1/5 the 13'-4" dim.) out from the front wall and 3'-11" (a min. of 1/3 greater than the front wall) from the side walls. This means they are 9'-8" apart and the speakers are toed at 31 ½ degrees. My head is set 4'-5"(approx. 1/3 the 13'-4" dim.) from the back wall which in turn leaves my ears at 8'-0" from the tweeters. This is a bit more "near field" than what is usual, but the recommended alternative of my head against an acoustic panel on the back wall is not possible in my room.

jd

This one's easy...there is no question about it, Dunlavy's are accurate in time and phase and reproduce accurately the signal fed them by the partnering amplifier.

This is an exceptional, albeit out of production, speaker.

Check out the step response of B&W. Why would anyone want a speaker that inverts part of the harmonic content of the signal fed to it?

Stevecham: You bring up an excellent question. In fact I think most speakers have some speakers wired out of phase. I too prefer the sound of speakers with first order networks and listen to Vmps. Before these I owned Vandersteen. The reality though is that most people do listen to speakers that have harmonic content inverted.

Warnerwh, I know and I have studied and compared this through extensive listening with friends' systems and at shows for years. I have also owned KEF, Dynaudio and Paradigm, while good products, are unacceptable to me compared to Thiel, Vandersteen, Dunlavy and Meadowlark. I can hear the difference these designs make. From a purely common sense standpoint, it confounds me that more designers don't spend the time and effort to achieve this level of harmonic accuracy. And I realize that the VAST majority of speakers manufactured are simply inaccurate in this regard. I'm not a disciple of Richard Hardesty, though I do think he raises some excellent points, for me it's simply a matter of what I can hear. For me, accuracy of timbre, even if it makes a crummy recording sound as crummy as it really is, is most important.