As usual Gpg4blu, you speak without knowing anything.
My father was an inventor with 13 patents to his name, and he also built audio components in his spare time for fun, he had a Bachelors degree in both Electrical engineering as well as Mechanical, guess who worked with him in his projects?
I started playing with Dynaco components at age 3 and had a reel to reel deck when I was 5, and discovered high end at 17 so you might be older but I started quite young.
I also built Dynakits and had my own ST 70 and Pas 3 and ran DCM Time Windows and Heil AMT 1D, I also built and modfied speakers as well. I owned a system at 20 which was better than most 50-60 year olds: Quad 63 USA monitors, Entec subs, Electrocompaniet preamp, MFA amp, Merrill table, Alphason arm, Ortophon MC 2000 wih matching transformer. That was my first mega rig.
Point I am making is I too have owned a boat load of great gear.
In my 30 years of doing audio as a FULL TIME JOB, I have setup and listened to hundreds of systems and more components than you can possibly imagine. Whether you like it or not unless your income came from the audio business you were and still are a hobbyist, and not a professional in the audio business.
As per writing for a magazine, many magazines hire people because they write well, I have been to several prominent reviewers and their systems sucked and I have also heard several great systems at reviewers as well.
and lastly YOU DON"T READ!
Jeff Dourgay of Tone Audio rated the Personas as being better speakers than everything he reviewed in 2016 and that included Wilson Alexias
http://www.tonepublications.com/to quote from the review:
Paradigm has created one of the world’s finest loudspeakers the right way, by applying what they’ve learned from decades of research, design and manufacturing know how to produce a speaker with no compromises. There’s nothing they don’t do, nothing they won’t play and from what I can deduce, nothing they won’t partner with regarding electronics.
I’ve heard way too many six figure loudspeakers with caveats attached. There are no caveats that apply to the Paradigm Persona 9H speakers, other than the fact that you probably can’t lift them without help. That’s it. This is a world class, zero compromise loudspeaker for $35,000/ pair.
This level of excellence and execution wasn’t even available ten years ago, and if Paradigm didn’t build everything in house, along with the scale of economies they enjoy, they couldn’t achieve this either
The Paradigm Persona 9H will be our Speaker of the Year for 2017. It’s one of the finest speakers I’ve had the pleasure to listen to at any price
as well as receiving a similar accolade in the Absolute Sound.
http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/2017-golden-ear-awards-anthony-h-cordesman/Along with Legacy, Paradigm is one of the two manufacturers I’ve found that can really do room compensation well. Its Persona 9H is truly flat, goes very deep, and is still quick and detailed in the bass. Its low end is matched by a superb new beryllium midrange and tweeter with a great deal of life and resolution but no hardness. With excellent driver integration and something much closer to a point-source presentation than most complex speaker systems, the 9H provides some of the best imaging and soundstage performance around.
As per me hating Wilson I don’t, I like their speakers and was an owner of the 3/2 and 5, but I find the company has lost its way in the pursuit of ever increasing profits.
How many speaker companies come out with a next generation product as frequently as Wilson with each model getting a huge price hike over the last one, nor does Wilson use state of the art drivers which are expensive like Magico, YG, Rockport or Paradigm does, sorry in my 30 + years of professional audio I have never heard a soft dome with the airyness and ultimate resolution of a good diamond or beryilium driver. I do love the ATC we sell but they don’t have the clarity and insanly holographic sound that the Personas do, they have their own merits and for the money they are fantastic.
You also fail to READ where I have said that I extoll products that I like even ones that I don’t sell such as Rockport.
In one of my posts I said we compared a $32k T+A amp and power supply vs a $90,000.00 pair of Boulder amps, and found that the T+A had better bass but the Boulder was still a bit better in some ways, and I also said the T+A was remarkable for standing up to a product 3 times the price.
What you fail to realize is I call them the way I hear them. I also value technogy and cost for the dollar,, the fact that the Persona uses state of the art room correction means that the Paradigm speakers will produce cleaner bass in most rooms vs any Wilson product because they do not have that advantage of superior technology.
You also recognized that I came up with a $9k digital combo that came to striking distance of a $40k DCS stack which you recognized as being true.
You may hate the messenger but you shouldn’t hate the message.
You may not like my style but my ears and integrity and system setup knowlege is well known call up Kevin Hayes of Vac, and ask him about me, call up Ted Denny of Synergistic and ask him the same way, you can call almost any manufacturers that over the years that I have championed that I know my stuff.
I am also not saying there aren’t others in the industry that produce good sound. what I find apalling is the lack of real system synergy and setup that way too many systems don’t sound like real music, sorry Quad and Harbeth guys if your system can’’t play live jazz and sound like live jazz you have a colored, non dynamic system.
I also owned Quads for 8 years before moving into the Watt Puppies, large panels suffer from an out of phase rear wave which means equil and opposite reactions cancel out which stunts the dynamics that the speakers have, I have yet to hear a panel which sounds as realistic as a good dynamic speaker.
My mission has always been to seek out the best possible sound for the most reasonable price possible, hence my experimentation which found that a well tweeked Bel Canto Universal player could compete with the 4 times the price DCS stack how many dealers would make it a point to show you that if they knew your could afford a DCS stack?
Over the years I discovered and promoted many brands that the industry now holds in great regard these include:
Nordost, BAT, Vac, Meadowlark Audio, Nuforce, Scaena, Balanced Audio Technology, Auralic, Running Springs.
I went gung ho with demonstrating that a Black Diamond racing shelf and footers could dramatically improve a system and was admonised by the general manager of Innovative at the time for not selling more expensive CD players instead of showing how tweeking up a less expensive player could actually improve the player to a point where a $1k player could sound better than a $3k one, you know the last part of the demo was it was replacing the $1k player with the $3k player on the isolation bass.
I could go on and on, about the cool tweeks we use to dramatically improve a sound system, and I am so sure I could dramatically improve your system, the sad thing is you have such an adversarial way about you it is just sad this hobby is in the pursuit of making music sound real and emmotional.
We post because the bad advice on these forums is just coppious and the biases that people have are ridculous.
Yes we champion products that we feel are superior but in my 12 years of running my own shop we have changed a lot of companies out for others, and that has always been in the pursuit of finding the best products for our clients, and best doesn’t necessarily mean the most expensive either.
We are always on the look out for new products that may be better.
Your thinking that the Personas are good but not world class loudspeakers reek of snobery and closemindness.
When the press who like me do this professionally say that the Personas are easily in this uber class makes you look awefully foolish.
If you like your Wilsons great for you, the fact that a Persona speaker can challenge them and perhaps outperfom them is going to be a fact as more and more reviewers listen to a well setup pair.
Look at the Axpona setup where Paradigm was showing $35k spekaers on a $4.5k amp, with probably inexpensive cables do you think that is going to sound amazing? We have the same $4.5k amp it is very nice but not in the same class as our expensive stuff.
If you were not blown away by our setup could it have been you were in the wrong seat. I tuned that room for one or two seats to be optimium that was all. If you were in the wrong seat you didn’t get the best sound.
Dave Owner
Audio Doctor NJ
