One thing to keep in mind is in show conditions, the speakers were not listened to with the same tracks and on the same day. I listened to the Vandersteens on Saturday. I listened for about a half hour. I did not find them overly bright. I think the statement that 95% of the rooms were overly tipped up is a little high, but for the most part you are correct. I would put the estimate at about 75%. I liked many of the same speakers that you did, in particular the JM Reynaud and the Daedalus. The Tidals were a mixed bag. Most of there presentation was excellent. However, I got to listen to a track from one of my discs that I am very familiar with. The song is "Tradition" from Stanley Clarke's "If this bass could only talk". I have heard this song well over one hundred times on more than a dozen good systems. Stanley has his bass tuned up one octave, so there is a lot going on in the lower midrange. There must have been some kind of suckout in that range as the sound of the bass was very soft and the speakers placed him BEHIND the drums on the stage. The bass is THE featured instrument of the song. After the song finished, I was asked what I thought. I told them what I heard and told them I had never heard him placed there before. They apparently heard it too, because they did not dispute it, but instead blamed the engineering of the disc for this as the speakers could not be to blame. I told them how familiar I was with the song and was told in no uncertain terms that their speaker was right and every other system I had heard it on was wrong. I listened to this song on a couple of other systems that weekend, and apparently, they were wrong also. The whole thing was very off-putting and kept from returning to the room the rest of the weekend.
