Not all of these speakers have the same bass extension, and the average listener will tend to prefer the bassier speaker since 30-35 percent of psychoacoustic weighting tends to be based on bass performance.
I heard the Confidence 20 at RMAF--demoed it for about 30 mins when the show was over. I listened to the JA Pulsar and TAD ME-1 at dealer locations. My order of preference is TAD ME-1, Pulsar, Confidence 20, in that order.
The TAD ME-1 has the most uniform dispersion, TAD’s stuff is all derivative of Harman’s research as Andrew Jones used to be a Floyd Toole disciple, and will be closest measuring to the ideal Harman Spinorama curve. It’s a lean sounding speaker and needs a subwoofer to fill in the bass, or you don’t have high output requirements you could try boosting the lower range with REW or Dirac Live.
The Pulsar is a good speaker, and it’s a good design choice for off the shelf drivers. If you don’t have the tools to fashion your own waveguide to match directivity at the crossover region, the next best thing is to pair a tweeter with a driver under 6", that way you reduce the effect of tweeter bloom beyond the crossover point. The Seas millennium tweeter is somewhat directional above 5.5k though, so the on-axis is a bit overly airy, and the off-axis sound is a bit overly mellow in comparison. With these speakers, you can play with toe-in to adjust treble tonality. My personal preference is for more uniform dispersion in the highs (i.e., the Harman ideal), like with the SB Acoustics TW29BN tweeter, so placement isn’t as important.
The Dynaudio Confidence 20 during my demo had similar tonal qualities to the C1--very extended and bassy, but had the same imaging issues. No waveguide and an excessively large bass driver means exactly what you would expect--dispersion that varies noticeably by angle and while the speaker sounded great in the nearfield with the speakers pointed right at you, small shifts did change the tonality somewhat and I'm reticent to drop big money ($10k+?) on something that didn’t at least get the polar response right, especially when there are very inexpensive ($500 or less) speakers that can pull it off.
