Paradigm Persona series

@contuzzi, Classical music has alot of metallic shrill sustained high frequency information particularly during loud complex orchestral crescendos that I don’t find present to the same degree in the tiny bit of jazz I listen to. Those are the only two "types" of music I listen to. Those instruments in classical music actually should sound shrill normally but when the speakers overemphasize that part of the frequency spectrum it becomes a problem with that music. I don’t notice it that much with other music I listen to, i.e. various types of jazz but jazz makes maybe 10% of what listen to, and classical 90%. With regard to my "positioning ability" I did and do find them a bit tricky and requiring nowhere near Paradigm's recommended toe-in in my room to get good focus on individual instruments and voices. I would guess less toe-in also helps mitigate the brightness.  When I run the ARC room correction on these speakers I also set the high pass filter at the 350 hz setting and increase the overall level of the bass 1.5db and that helps warm them up a little bit. There’s no question that the speakers in my space are incredibly holographic. Still there’s an aspect of the sound on classical that I would say is more clinical than romantic/involving. And can we give ad hominem criticism a rest folks and just talk about our experience with the speakers? Your experience may be different than mine...that’s not only fine, it’s why I started the thread.

Can anyone expound a bit on what the "vibration-cancelling" rear bass drivers are doing beside working for an inert cabinet which doesn't resonate and color the sound?  Is that all they're doing?

I disagree.  In the concert hall I've never heard massed violins playing fortissimo sound shrill.
But I do hear that on a number of recordings and through a number of speakers.
Early DGG digital recordings are particularly guilty of this.  I've never found a metal domed tweeter that completely avoided this--the beryllium that Salk uses came close, the different one used by Fritz even closer.
Needless to say, recording+speaker effects can be cumultative.
Long live soft domes!

I’m with twoleftears on these points.  

1) I love the sound of an orchestra live - it’s never shrill even though there’s a lot of high frequency information.   
2) one set of my speakers has a metal dome tweeter and I’ll never make that mistake again. I can’t tame it no matter what changes to electronics and cables I’ve made.  Metal and tweeters are a bad combination in my experience.
3) early DGG - heck most any recording by Deutsche Grammophone is nearly unlistenable.  It’s too bad because there were some really great performances that were very poorly recorded. I have a recording of Mahler’s 5th by DG that is so unbelieavably bad, it’s a wonder they ever released it.  Do those guys actually listen to these things when mastering?  Maybe the tweeters were blown out in the mastering room. It was a gift from my dad, or I would have returned it!