erik,
Having auditioned the A3s I agree they have at least the potential from what I heard to be class leading in their price and something of a giant killer.
Though it feels a bit odd to see myself write that insofar as they didn’t actually turn my crank at all. I much prefer, for instance, the Joseph Audio or Devore O series speakers I’ve just been auditioning. For instance, all the same drum tracks on the Devore speakers sounded significantly more "like drums" in terms of tone and character than through the A3s. And the Joseph speakers had a similar sense of clarity, lack of grain (actually better than the A3s in that regard) and transient precision (though smaller sound), yet voices had an incredibly authentic sounding warmth of timbre, making voices sound "real" in a way that I never heard once through the A3s.(I'm always comparing real to reproduced.
For instance a recording I often play for evaluating male voice is The Beast In Me from Johnny Cash's american recordings. It's an amazing, bare recording of his voice with super soft guitar, that can sound startlingly real and in the room on the right system. When I play it auditioning speakers it's often with someone else in the room, usually a salesman who I might talk with. And when the recording is playing I listen carefully to the qualities of the "real" male voice vs the reproduce male voice - does the voice coming through the speaker have that same warm, damped, organic human quality and timbre I'm hearing from the real voice? Johnny cash through the JA speakers were seemingly bang on. About as close as I've ever heard. As I said, I never got that from the A3s for whatever reason.
Also, whenever I audition speakers I investigate the sound from many angles and distances, to see where they integrate, sound most lively, or most rich, to move in or out of room nodes, etc.
I did find the A3s (driven by a solid state amp I can no longer remember) could sound a tad "dark" from a number of positions, not quite having the sense of "air" of some other speakers (which could just be in their frequency variations of course). Though in some other positions the tone sounded less dark and more natural to me (actually moving further or closer did this, in my audition).
