Speakers to hang on to for LIFE

I have loved the Supertowers for years and love them all over again since I hooked up the Ayre integrated. I get my new DAC/cable this week and can't wait to burn it in. I bet it's going to sound that much better. That said, I'm selling them off (let me know if interested) along with my other two sets of proacs so that I can afford the Vandy Treo's. I love the rightness of the Treo's, but I will be fine with the Proacs until I can sell them, that's for sure.

As for tired of looking at something, I'm past that part of my life. Maybe in a car, but not in a speaker. The tall, slim, teak Proacs are attractive to me and always have been. I've never been a B&W guy at all. Way to hot on the top end for me. The new diamond series are the first ones I can listen to that don't make my ears bleed. Again, I realize how popular they are and when I say that about their sound, I'm talking the top level ones since the 800's came out years ago. Just not for me, but many swear by them.

I just love vintage infinity's. Had RS 6b when I was young and just bought them again as backspeakers in my surround set up. They still sound beautiful and are perfect for smaller rooms. In my living room I have used Infinity renaissance 90 for the last 5-6 years. I love them. But having just moved to a new home with a different and larger living room I had problems getting the sound I wanted. I now know that it was largely due to setup and speaker placement challenges, but I still bought myself a set of infinity IRS Betas. Anyway I will never sell my renaissance speakers.

None because the electronics in active speakers will fail in 2 decades or so and the in passive speakers you will have to replace the capacitors within 15 years or so.

Astrallite, I guess it is a matter of how old you are when you decide they are for the rest of your life. Maybe my Rectilinear IIIs are still working or my Fulton Premiers but certainly not my Infinity ServoStatic 1s.

But in reality I cannot imagine living with the particular compromise in the speaker you own for a long time.

I've long had a "sonic crush" on the sound coming from several cinema auditoriums and their associated speaker systems. This hasn't got anything to do with "hifi" per se (though strictly speaking, it should), but simply that the oftentimes effortless, full-bodied, dynamic, and indeed rather coherent presentation appeals to me immensely. That it doesn't relate to "hifi" (in the more or less traditional sense) as such is by no means to be understood negatively, but rather that it imprints itself intuitively as something "right." I find it the more interesting, even truer, that my impressions herein have been formed under conditions that "breaks" contrary to the typical environment under which we relate to hifi, that is in a darkened auditorium (usually) filled with people, no visible equipment, and a focus towards seeing a film.

This brings me to a shift or transition that is still underway towards... a settlement? Some 10 years ago a visit to a hifi-exhibition lead me to rooms with a range of horn-driven JBL speakers - the S4800's, Array 1400, and not least the overlooked S9800SE's. Here the sound, especially from the latter, in many ways gave me the sensation of "finally, at last" (closely related in some ways with the cinema sound experience mentioned above) and I simply kept hanging around and "inhaled" the music here for hours. I've not since become a JBL-fan, but it informed me about a preference that has since been sought after, albeit not initially with horns and compression drivers as the common denominator. Instead, my "deviation," so to speak, went from direct radiating tweeters to ribbon-based speakers (Raidho) and then to waveguide speakers going from the Finish Amphion speakers to US-based S.P. Technology/Aether Audio, and finally the Polish originated hORNS speakers where a variety of horns and waveguides are used in conjunction with compression drivers and pro-style mid/bass drivers, in what are usually 2-way systems.

What is to be brought from this is the addictive nature of the effortless, full-bodied and dynamic presentation from compression drivers paired with larger and efficient mid/bass units crossed over no higher than 1.4-1.5kHz - depending on the size of these units and their implementation. Moreover the mid/bass units here used are not sub-bass units per se, but have to be capable playing midrange as well - and this is very important; instead of trying to squeeze out sub-bass from one package a much more important emphasis is placed on the mid-bass and integration with the horn/waveguide and its compression driver, and so maintain only one cross-over frequency in a not too audibly critical spectrum. Whatever one seeks in the sub frequencies must be attained with the use of (preferably) two, or even more subwoofers.

So, this is not about a particular speaker or even brand to hang on to for life, but a speaker principle that has gone on to establish itself as indispensable compared to the more typical regime of hifi-speakers: direct radiating dome tweeters now sound thin, malnourished and strained; typical hifi mids sound compressed and lacking dynamic impact; and not least the upper bass/lower mids of typically larger multi-way hifi-speakers simply lack the cohesion to bind together this very important area with the rest of the frequency spectrum into a homogenous musical whole.

The typical application that is associated with this speaker principle I've now come to cherish for the last many years may not lead one to think of "hifi," but it doesn't matter - except for the ones who are lead to dismiss it out of a prejudiced stance; what matters is that it sounds like real, live acoustical music, something that would (or should) lead one to reevaluate the now established term "hifi" and question its merits as the true holder of the meaning 'high fidelity.' I don't disregard other opinions on what hifi is, but if the goal is seeking a live presentation of acoustical music in a real space environment then the matter presents itself less subjectively and into a different direction than where the established hifi-milieu has come to "coagulate" - if you ask me. Sorry for the detour...