Naim and Elac Adante, Wow

@audiotroy 
disagree with your assessment of Harbeth being musical and lacking detail similar to the Vandersteen speakers.  
I appreciate your extreme knowledge of speakers and speaker design but IMHO the Harbeths are musical and detailed, especially the C7ES3 and SuperHL5+ which have very nice, detailed sounding Seas aluminum dome tweeters.  they also sound very natural, simialr to live music due in part to the warmth from controlled cabinet resonances.  In addition I have never owned a speaker that let me enjoy nearly all of the music in my collection without unacceptable harshness. 
many speakers have additional detail, some artificially so and as such become "hyper detailed" to the point of listenning fatigue and incompatability with a greater percentage of recordings. 
It is a fine line to walk down that balances detail, fatigue and pleasing sound.   

Avanti, 

Heard the 40.1 at the New York Audio show, and the 30.1 at Capital in both cases the speakers didn't have that incredible treble clarity that we hear in many of the more modern designs. The Harbeths have a great midrange and very listenble. Both cases neither speaker system made us go wow.

Harbeth is one of those brands that a lot of people swear by, and if you enjoy yours that is fantastic. 

The entire concept of cabinets which ring is very controversial, yes it is musical but do you want a transducer to color the sound or do you want to hear what is actually there?

This is the arguement between the "musical" camp and the "high resolution" camp.

Owned Quad 63 for years yes you could listen to them for hours and hours but compared to the WP 3/2 and the 5 we moved to they didn't sound like live music the way the Wilsons did.

Our philsophy is to produce the sound of real music warts and all. So in the case of a speaker like the Adantes which are very visceral loudspeakers with a bit of a spike at 10k means you have to find electronics which compliment them and whose properties are the inverse of what the speakers faults are that produces a good match. 

Adantes require a warmer amp with a polite top end, which is the typical sound of Naim and certain tube amplifiers and of course other solid state brands as well. 

We prefer the more neural sound of ATC over the Harbeths when it comes to classic British monitors, haven't heard the new Spendors so we can't comment on those. Also the ATC are priced lower for a comparable speaker, howerver, the Harbeths are stunning loudspeakers while the ATC are plain janes. 

Again it all comes down to what you value.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

no sense arguing with the technically incompetent 
a tapered enclosure solve a different problem than an aerodynamic magnet structure..

of course you are claiming that the patent office got it wrong, while citing a bunch of patents pending...might want to rethink that..

as for pistonic, becoming easy to measure, versu claim with recent German advances in laser technology - nice utube video of the 7 driver vs a “ claimer” with 10% out of phase trash

as for balsa, you claim no innovation there - prove that with facts....

you get end grain high density balsa to adequately bond to CF reinforced epoxy resin without core crush and I will fly out and pay your patent fees....but as it turns out you have invented what ????

get off the hate, acknowledge the innovation, say it aint your cup of tea....but for intelligent customers you come off as an unprintable word...

Sorry Tomic,

Hate to disagree, but your arguements don’t hold water, an "aerodynamic" midrange driver will eliminate reflections off of the parallel surfaces behind the driver’s surface.

A tapered tube is designed to funnel the back wave energy away from the cone in the first place, by redirecting the rear wave into a transmission line loaded tube with different densities of stuffing material, this result would therfore would be much more effective then by just removing some reflective surface material behind the driver, without a mechanisim to redirect and disipate the back wave, you are not really accomplishing all that much however, it would still be an improvement over a driver that is not built to control the rear wave in some manner.

As per bonding a carbon skin to balsa that is why Richard got the patent, howerver, JM Labs and Thiel were bonding Fiberglass skins or metal diaphrams to light weight damped foam cores for years so again where really is the innovation in that? Is Balsa and Carbon fiber better than a Fiberlgass sheet over foam or is that marketing hype? Can you prove that claim?

Unless you actually measure the different bonded drivers ie a Focal vs a Vandy driver you really don’t know one is which is better in terms of the drivers response and  less risidual coloration.

What started this is someone claiming "revolutionary" we are refuting that by saying that there are other engineers who created composite core/cone diaphrams earlier. Which one is better is open to conjucture.

Considering that Vandersteen is the only one to use this cone vs Focal who uses their own, the world won’t really know.

Tomic you could also conjucture if you built a diaphram that was inherently light and stiff and self damped you wouldn’t need to try to bond materials together, wouldn’t it be great if that diaphram woud exisit.

I guess you might want to look at Magico or YG or Rockport’s diaphrams or Kef or Paradigm or Vivid.

I guess a company that could spend $4 million dollars developing all their own drivers wouldn’t have access to any and every state of the art measuring device know to man both Kef and Paradigm as well as B&W have state of the art research labs do you honestly think that their cones aren’t perfectly pistonic?

Please keep drinking the coolaid. The 7s are very nice speakers if you love yours that is great, personally if I was going to spend $70k on a set of speakers I would buy a set of Vivid G1 any day of the week, but I guess Lawrence Dickie ins’t a loudspeaker genius as well.

By the way we are not Vivid dealers, so we got no skin in that game.

Good night to you, and go listen to a set of G1 and lets talk.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

I have no dog in this fight. I am not in the market for loudspeakers or any type of component. Audiotroy, I hate to break this to you, but your constant touting of Legacy and your slow but ramped-up cheerleading of Elac is growing tiresome. You are shilling the lines you sell, plain and simple. In the process of shilling, you are expressing some very personal sound attribute preferences as if they are objectively superior. As I push 60 and reach 42 years in the hobby, I believe I have gained the wisdom to see all of audio as compromises. Relying on the concept of stereo; two boxes or other form of transducers of some sort, is in and of itself a very steep compromise. Everything leading up to those transducers involve compromises. I appreciate deep taut lightning-quick and scalpel-precise bass but whether you like it or not, the loudspeakers that have such tight bass don't feature coherent of-a-whole-cloth sound. With almost no known exception, you can have one or the other but not both. And in addition to the above, your shilling is contradictory. First you go from exclaiming the virtues of a killer match of Naim Atom and Elac Andante, then you go into a critical segue that Jones and Elac built down to a price by opting for sub-par drivers and cabinet construction and then you careen back to absolute praise. Your constant references (pun) to Legacy as unquestioned standard-bearers is contradictory too-Legacy pioneered the "big box with lots of drivers" approach at a slightly higher level of parts choice than the present bizarre fad of Tekton. Despite tons of advertising, not a single well-respected reviewer has ever positively reviewed one of their products. I am not in the biz, but I am willing to bet that the mark-up on the lines you happen to peddle is significantly higher than the mark-up on the lines you went out of your way to single-out as lines you won't (or can't) sell.