Jtgofish:
The answer to your first question is "no."
As for speed, these things are LIGHTNING fast. When I said they have the most incredible combination of high end detail and smoothness (both) that I'd ever heard in ANY loudspeaker irrespective of price, bar none, that's EXACTLY what I meant.
These are phenomenally, incredibly smooth but they are absolutely, positively, unequivocally, NOT smeared. No, no, no, no.....NO! Quite the opposite (I'm not angry, just trying to hammer home a point here...). I UNDERSTAND that those two things almost NEVER go together, but I swear to you, with this speaker they do. To give you an idea, I thought that these made my Sennheiser HD600's sound....kinda BAD! (To be fair, that was with a Ramsey SHA-1 headphone amp, which is certainly a great value and has gobs of power, but probably falls, um....short...of being hi fi, at least by Audiogon member standards). I ended up getting Stax Lambda Pro Signature Pro Earspeakers with an SRM T1 headphone amplifier/"energizer," and even that set-up doesn't sound as good (to me) as the Summits. The Stax Lambda Signatures MAY have SLIGHTLY more detail, but I'm not even sure about that.
Dale Pitcher is on the cutting edge of the cutting edge, period, AND he's cutting in the RIGHT DIRECTION. In my opinion, he's an under-recognized genius, with a great ear and the practical application skills to match his theoretical brilliance. He doesn't really advertise or toot his own horn, yet has never had to declare bankruptcy in 25 years. He SOLD Essence prior to starting Intuitive Design.
If phenomenal, lightning fast, detailed, smooth, accurate, phase coherent, dynamic speakers are what you're looking for, then you really owe it to yourself to listen to these. These are his "entry level" speaker, with the next models up selling for ~$38,000 (Pingoras), then ~65,000 (most recent version of Denalis).
