@whitecamaross I would suggest you try ALL of them. I am partial to one brand because we sold tons of them and they USUALLY did a good job. However, you are clearly in a league of your own with your devotion to this hobby, (THANK YOU!!) so you might be best served by trying as many of them as you can. Just remember, as @charles1dad has pointed out, your room is most important. Unfortunately, I have had customers who's rooms simply did NOT work with dipole radiators no matter what we did. SO, some may sound horrible until you move them 1 inch, believe it or not. I didn't until I did it!
One thing we used to do was called the "hand test" in those days. Speak with your hands in horn shape pressing against your face, then with your hands in front of your mouth an inch or two and then remove your hands from your face/mouth area and speak (one continuous sentence) and the person listening will hear differences. Whether or not they LIKE these differences is up to their own personal taste, of course, but the "no hands" demo was to show how boxless speakers do not color sound like cones and boxes or horns do. Doesn't mean some people don't prefer a colored sound. Any live concert these days features amplified sound in some form--possibly not at some older concert venues--I have not been to all of them!
When we were able to set up the boxless speakers correctly in a room with very high quality components, we were always amazed at the realistic reproduction we heard. Back in those days, we used the Lincoln Mayorga direct-to-disc records as sources as well as high-quality tape sources...this was the 1970's, after all--and were able to truly A-B stuff since I had two identical sets of the items driving the speakers. Now, speaker tech has greatly improved since then, so no doubt some boxes have improved. As a side note, I am quite amused at the recent trend to make boxes 6' tall today. Wonder where they got that idea???
Anyway, give the boxless ones a try in your system in your room after giving thema listen at a dealer who knows what they are doing. As a personal note, I would MAYBE try a different pre-amp. I have not heard them lately, but even though Mac stuff was made mil-spec in the day and probably is today, like the Levinson stuff, it did not SOUND very good, which means that you could tell it was in the loop. Intense devotion to quality parts and manufacturing processes does not necessarily result in products that reproduce sound accurately as I found out over the years. We discovered that you really need super-quality components to truly hear the difference these type of speakers make. By the way, let's not get into the gut-punch bass sound that many love. You have to add a quality woofer to get that from ANY system, box or boxless, IMO.
This is such an enjoyable exercise to be commenting on. Thanks for doing what you do. It is EXACTLY what we did in those days, but we had far fewer choices to select from and the idea of interconnects making much difference was in its infancy, as were turntable isolation techniques, room baffles for customers, not studios, low-output cartridge-amp combos, different arms, etc. The biggest challenge today is that there are so many quality products around that your work is ten times more complicated (and fun!) than it was in our day. However, the goal is clearly the same--find what YOU like in YOUR room and buy it if you can!
Cheers!
One thing we used to do was called the "hand test" in those days. Speak with your hands in horn shape pressing against your face, then with your hands in front of your mouth an inch or two and then remove your hands from your face/mouth area and speak (one continuous sentence) and the person listening will hear differences. Whether or not they LIKE these differences is up to their own personal taste, of course, but the "no hands" demo was to show how boxless speakers do not color sound like cones and boxes or horns do. Doesn't mean some people don't prefer a colored sound. Any live concert these days features amplified sound in some form--possibly not at some older concert venues--I have not been to all of them!
When we were able to set up the boxless speakers correctly in a room with very high quality components, we were always amazed at the realistic reproduction we heard. Back in those days, we used the Lincoln Mayorga direct-to-disc records as sources as well as high-quality tape sources...this was the 1970's, after all--and were able to truly A-B stuff since I had two identical sets of the items driving the speakers. Now, speaker tech has greatly improved since then, so no doubt some boxes have improved. As a side note, I am quite amused at the recent trend to make boxes 6' tall today. Wonder where they got that idea???
Anyway, give the boxless ones a try in your system in your room after giving thema listen at a dealer who knows what they are doing. As a personal note, I would MAYBE try a different pre-amp. I have not heard them lately, but even though Mac stuff was made mil-spec in the day and probably is today, like the Levinson stuff, it did not SOUND very good, which means that you could tell it was in the loop. Intense devotion to quality parts and manufacturing processes does not necessarily result in products that reproduce sound accurately as I found out over the years. We discovered that you really need super-quality components to truly hear the difference these type of speakers make. By the way, let's not get into the gut-punch bass sound that many love. You have to add a quality woofer to get that from ANY system, box or boxless, IMO.
This is such an enjoyable exercise to be commenting on. Thanks for doing what you do. It is EXACTLY what we did in those days, but we had far fewer choices to select from and the idea of interconnects making much difference was in its infancy, as were turntable isolation techniques, room baffles for customers, not studios, low-output cartridge-amp combos, different arms, etc. The biggest challenge today is that there are so many quality products around that your work is ten times more complicated (and fun!) than it was in our day. However, the goal is clearly the same--find what YOU like in YOUR room and buy it if you can!
Cheers!