Salk owners -- any interest in a more sensitive Salk model?

It seems that Jim Salk places a high value on even frequency response and phase integrity in his designs. To achieve his goals, in general, seems to require fairly complex crossovers of rather high parts count, High parts count is the enemy of high sensitivity due to insertion loss (am I wrong here?). So, you are basically asking him to stray from the core values he embraces by requesting high(ish) sensitivity. I wonder if he would really be able to commit and put his heart in it.

I have a friend who once owned Salk for a few years and then decided he wanted to dabble in the waters of high sensitivity and moved on to Daedalus (where he remains today on his second pair). He sold his Salks to a work colleague and that person has since moved on to a second pair of Salks. Both are currently happy campers. I have been to these guy's homes on more than one occasion, heard the systems, and have certainly enjoyed both presentations (in vastly different settings but, in both cases, powered by tubes although the Salks have recently been repowered with SS). Both speakers feature beautiful woodwork and I believe the Daedali are solid wood as opposed to veneer but I have to say that the Salks seem to be the more professionally rendered finish while the Daedali appear to be more of "made in the garage" type product. This implies nothing about their sound and, Tom, please don't hate me for saying this...it's just the way I truly see it.

Sorry if I got sidetracked a little back there. My point is, there are plenty of builders out there already who fully embrace the high sensitivity approach and I think you would be better served to proceed in that direction than to try to coerce Salk into building a speaker that eschews his core philosophies about what disciplines need to be incorporated into his definition of a "proper sounding high performance speaker". Now, having said all of this, maybe Mr. Salk will come on board and proceed to blow up my whole hypothesis point by point. I will certainly listen.

Just one more thing...92-93db sensitivity into 8 ohms certainly trumps 84-86db into 4 ohms but it still isn't truly high sensitivity, FWIW.

+1 to @acresverde 's post.

Like acresverde, I'll be direct... I would choose Daedalus over Salk, every time for their sound quality performance but Salk every time for Salk's cabinetry.

If you want both, take a look at Volti Audio. There are others...mentioning Volti since you have Klipsch.

So, you are basically asking him to stray from the core values he embraces...
I think you would be better served to proceed in that direction than to try to coerce Salk into building a speaker that eschews his core philosophies...

This post is about whether Salk owners would be interested. I’m not asking him to *do* anything. I’m asking him what he thinks, as I’m asking folks here what they think. I have no power. I'm a guy with a keyboard asking a couple questions.

Jim is a mature businessman with a vision for his successful company. Because I understand that, I wouldn’t ask him to stray from his core values, because I know that he knows his own mind. And the notion that a single customer (or a thread starter) would be "coercing" him by asking if there was a market of a single new product, well, that’s just not what "coercion" means.

In our exchange, Jim saw the validity of this question and he is thinking about it a bit, especially after hearing about some of the innovations Devore engineered with his speakers. Jim of course is just thinking and it would of course have to be done to his satisfaction.

Two last points. Agreed, 92db is not highly sensitive. If Salk were to find a way to pull off the engineering, he would do well to pursue a higher sensitivity -- e.g. Zu, Omega, etc. There is quite a selection of tube amps coming on the market these days, and a Salk model that plays well with them would be a good business proposition. And, finally, while Jim has a speaker at 92 db, they’re $14995 per pair. If he were to really hit the market with a sensitive speaker, and they were higher than 92db, he’d really be ringing the bell if he could provide Salk-levels of beauty and tonality with a price that competes with Zu, Tekton, and Omega (if not Devore and AudioNote).

Of course, Jim is quite free to ignore my email. But if a lot of people post saying "Wow, I’d buy that" then he has an inkling that it might have a market if a design met his standards.

"core values", where are those documented?

Speaker designers and builders try all kinds of stuff, and there is nobody regulating what lane or box they need to stay in. Try it. If people buy them, build more.

@hilde45   I could have chosen a more apt and moderate word than coerce, I guess. I believe Jim recognizes the inherent virtues of high sensitivity, but, nonetheless opts to forego that path because the price to be paid to achieve it is too high in terms of sacrifices he would have to make in other areas he deems more important.

@decooney    Before I made my initial post I made sure to go to Salk's webpage to determine what characteristics a "proper high performance speaker" should embrace. Phase integrity and even frequency response were the qualities that seemed to resonate the most in his philosophy. I am not discounting his recognition of the need for strong, well made cabinetry or high quality drivers and crossover parts. I am not implying that he is a 2 trick pony at all, just to be clear.