Magico - Wide vs. Narrow

I owned & really enjoyed the Snell A- III’s back in the earlier 80’s & they were excellent in many ways. Amongst many other things, they used only average quality ( for the day) drivers that they carefully individually tested to ensure very close tolerances to their specs & matched them in each speaker pair. They tossed the ones that didn’t cut it. I woulnd up selling them for Proac EBS’s which was their top of the line then. The Proac’s had considerably better midrange & high end & utilized very good quality drivers ( famous ATC dome midrange still considered excellent today) & a good Scanspeak tweeter. The woofer was a 10 inch ATC & the bass was good but the Snells bested them in this area. The Proac’s imaged better & had relatively narrow cabinets that in often typical British fashion for the day, did not have the most stout cabinets. 

@jonwolfpell - Very interesting perspective.  I'm curious about one thing though.  Did you find a difference in imaging?  Would you say either speaker had a wider sweet spot?

If I recall correctly, the Snells had an overall bigger soundstage w/ a wider sweet spot but the Proacs had better image specificity & depth. To be fare though, the room I had the Snells in before I switched to the Proac did not allow me to pull them away from the front wall sufficiently, only about 2 feet & & they probably would have liked a bit more. Also I had a Conrad Johnson Premier Four  power amp that put out a real 100 watts / side w/ 4 EL 34 power tubes / side & w/ the low sensitivity of the Snells, they probably could have used more  as I liked to play them loudly. 

i once had the opportunity to borrow a friends amazing Jadis preamp which at the time was amongst the very best available. The combo of it , the CJ & the Proacs taught what real imaging was all about w/ space & air around & in between different instruments & voices in a beautiful unified whole. Not many systems that I’ve heard since could do this as well. 
 

The American peer group of speakers at that time Thiel, Vandersteen, Snell, Dunlavey all delivered excellent sound w value drivers and certainly different design principles… A wide sweet spot is by definition lossy. Probably should widen out my list of RIP for the various genius no longer with us. 

oopppps.. left out Jon D and the DQ-10