speaker upgrade fever

@grislybutter 

Oh, I had not realised it was your compilation! I assumed it was from a technical publication.

You are not the one who called them beercans, neither did you call them bookshelf speakers.  I have difficulty linking to responses to posters, especially mid-stream ...and I tend to read all posts, no matter who they might be addressed to.

I will admit that, as an electrostatic enthusiast, the Reference 1 design goes against many of my prior conceptions.  I thought boxes with parallel faces promoted standing waves.  I thought the volume under a stand-mount could be better used as cabinet volume.  I thought diffraction from cabinet edges was always a problem.  I thought you needed big drivers to move lots of air.  Most of all, I hated non-coincident drivers because of the cancellation effects off-axis.

The KEF white paper addresses these issues in ways I still find fascinating. For example, any cutout in the baffle can act as a diffraction point, so KEF designd the bass drivers to be as physically flat as possible in the plane of the baffle, to minimise diffraction of the coincident tweeter / midrange.  Who would have thought ...

I’ve a fair bit of seat time setting up two systems now with Mimas ( which is like all Jim White designs ) a very robust but neutral product …it is not bright. Both systems used the Treo CT which has a fantastic tweeter - reasonably flat to 30 khz. For your budget used you can get Quattro CT w built in subs, 11 bands of EQ below 120 hz … and a glorius midrange… you will need to have Aesthetix or your tech high pass tge Mimas. I’m a fan of the KEF also…  they have great engineers with ears also

The KEF Reference 1, as well as its bigger siblings, have been objectively measured to a very high degree of accuracy and are natively about as neutral a speaker as you can find.  The Reference family of speakers (excluding the 4c center channel, which has a bit more deviation with some rolled-off treble) is within 2dB of the reference level frequency. If you want a warmer tone, that's fine, and I'll second the Legacy Audio products as a great fit there, but if they are coming across as bright, that's far more likely the effect of your room and/or your electronics imparting that brightness. Before investing in new speakers, look at your space and see if you need to adjust your speakers' toe-in or put in some treatments to knock down the highs a bit.

Pure Audio Project open baffle speakers. I have/breaking in Quintet 10's with Heil AMT Tweeters.  Many options and configurations. Talk with Ze'ev--great guy.

Without a doubt, Fink Team KIM. Efficient, glorious mid-range, electrostatic-like tweeter but maybe better, some eq adjustments on rear of speaker, not a big box and beautiful German-made cabinets in a wide range of finishes. Fabulous reviews.