narrow and wide baffles and imaging

I auditioned Devore O96’s when I was looking to upgrade. System was very good and listening room was in an old house with plaster walls and high ceilings. I was ready to be dazzled but in the 45 minutes I listened, the number one disappointment was the imaging. Granted, I was coming from Focal Electra standmounts but nowhere in the reviews had there been anything but gushing praise for the Devores. I value good imaging in my speakers so this was a dealbreaker for me. I purchased Totem Element Metals instead, which image almost as good as the Focals. So in, my mind, I have a bias towards narrow baffles imaging better than wide baffles. I am sure this is a gross stereotyping but still...

tangramca,


What exactly did you not like about the imaging on the Devore speakers?


I've auditioned them and found the imaging surprisingly good.  Depth maybe a bit foreshortened though.

I've had a pair of very skinny (about 5.5 inches wide) Silverline Prelude speakers for years and they image amazingly well, in fact much better than various other tower speakers I've owned. However, they were retired to make way for a pair of Klipsch Heresy IIIs that image even better, with an amazingly well defined soundstage...and although they sit on the floor pointed up at what seems to be the exact angle my ears require, the image doesn't seem to originate from the floor and the image height seems like it's coming from a speaker at ear level. About 9 feet from my head, and 6 feet apart with some toe in seems to work best. These have horn mids and tweets which I imagine blow right by the baffle, and the 12" bass speaker covers most of the width of the cabinet so it's its own baffle...the whole thing baffles me, but I like it. It's good.

The Devore O/93's do a strange thing in my room-with the right cabling and placement they throw out a wide wall of sound way beyond and above the confines of the boxes-when the recording has it. But what they don't do is provide pin-point placement anywhere within the wall of sound. I don't expect a single person who reads this thread to be familiar with Shakey Graves or his latest release "Can't Wake Up" but I can't think of a single recording that better reflects this weird dichotomy. It is not at all unusual for me to look around in my listening room thinking that someone must be calling me from behind because a sound I am not familiar with comes from "out of nowhere" as I get accustomed to this new recording, but if I play, for example, the excellently recorded Madeleine Peyroux "Careless Love", I don't "see" her singing in front of me the way my old B&W 805 standmounts would have defined her. If I play the old chestnut "The ARC Choir" from Mapleshade through my digital rig, the choir is wide and high but the individual singers are not defined with the specificity that I know is there in the recording. I am happy with them, but they have their trade-offs.