Accuracy vs. Enjoyment

Al,
"I've found that improvements in accuracy, especially with respect to resolution of fine detail, can make mediocre or poor recordings sound more enjoyable. As well as improving the reproduction of great recordings, of course"

I couldn't agree more. It's exactly why I go through all the trouble of it.

+1 @jafant


Accurate speakers and an accurate Power amp and accurate source coupled with your favourite flavourful tube preamp is a way to have your cake and eat it!!!

P.S. to my previous post:  RV, I believe that your Dahlquist DQ20 speakers use first-order (6 db/octave) crossover slopes and are time coherent.  I'm not certain of that, though.

Best regards,
-- Al 

Al, your thinking on the subject is supported by my experience that a speaker having a midrange driver with as wide a bandwidth as possible, reproducing as much of the music as possible, is, all things being equal, a very good thing. In that way, it should therefore sound as close to that of the Stax ESL phones (I’m still happy with my SR Lambda Pros) as a speaker can. As Roger Modjeski has been opining here lately, the crossovers in speakers are more responsible for loudspeaker "problems" than are their drivers. I have long found planars that crossover from their midrange driver(s) to any woofer and/or tweeter at very low and high (respectively) frequencies very much to my liking. I am currently enjoying a pair of Eminent Technology LFT-8b’s, each of which has a pair of magnetic-planar drivers reproducing 180Hz to 10kHz, the filters at those frequencies being 1st order (6dB/octave). Not as transparent as my Quad 57’s, but pretty darn good. Transparent enough to reveal low-level musical detail to a satisfying degree, but not so transparent as to reveal the worst sound of really bad recordings. And they play much louder than the Quads! Good for Beethoven Symphonies and AC/DC ;-).