Paradigm Persona series

The rear bass drivers based on their design are vibration cancelling by working in concert with the front drivers.

The purpose of them is to provide additonal bass output and to vent the rear bass wave around the rear of the speakers to better allow for the correction curve to work optimally. 

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Persona dealers

@audiotroy Thanks.  Since that rear wave is out of phase with forward facing wave (am I correct on that?), I did wonder whether that rear wave is cancelling out bass waves that make their way to the rear of the cabinet creating a cardioid dispersion characteristic which you see some manufacturer's attempting.  Could that be at work also?  Paradigm oddly doesn't say much about it other than describing the rear drivers as "vibration cancelling."

@contuzzi  Really just about any large scale orchestral music recorded on BIS with large amount of brass.  The brass should be shrill but not so shrill that they no longer sound natural....since I'm in a concert hall at least twice a month with a real symphony orchestra playing standard repertoire I know what live performance sounds like (to me anyway YMMV), and although there's a definite shrill sheen to brass that borders on a speaker that pumps up that level by 4-5 db is going to make those peaks sound TOO metallic and too etched.  I DO believe the Personas do that because its what I hear but using only about 5-10 degrees of toe in does help mitigate it somewhat.  Still when it happens it doesn't sound "right" to me because it doesn't sound like the brass sound live in a concert hall.

Enjoying the 9Hs today doing some experimenting with different amps. Specifically the Prima Luna Duologue Integrated which I find too muddy in the midrange as an integrated, however when I feed the HT passthrough on that amplifier with a different tubed preamp, its a different story, opening up the midrange nicely. Tubes may be the answer here. I had been running my beloved Aesthetix preamps, feeding that to the Pass, and still just getting too much clinical detail on classical music. Running the PL as the poweramp and setting it for either triode mode or ultralinear...both sound extremely good and both I think are rolling off the highs a bit which with these speakers may be a good thing. I also have a Woo Audio W2 lying around usually doing headphone duty for my Beyerdynamic Tesla headphones but that little puppy can also be used as a simply little OTL preamp (there’s a switch on the back for converting it from headphone use to preamp use). So for the past hour I’ve been listening to the WA2 feeding the power amp portion of the Prima Luna preamp and getting good results. Next I’ll try using the WA2 as a preamp feed the Pass X150.8. I have found that even subtle changes in the system (and these are not subtle) have very observable results one way or the other once again pointing to the fact that these are very highly resolving speakers.  Another 9H user has been posting he's had good luck with SET amps (fairly powerful for SET) driving the 9H's really well, such as the Line Magnetic integrated.

Pwinson,

you should also look at cabling, and power conditioning what about room tuning any treatments? Can you post pictures of your setup?

 What cables are you using? Are you using power cables? Are you using power conditioning? Vibration isolation can also make a huge improvment.

As we have said time and time before the Personas are very rewarding loudspeakers when used with the right stuff.

We have a client using the Persona 9H with the T+A HV series integrated amplifier and we did a comparison of his Steinway playing a piece vs the system reproducing the same piece, the system was very close to the sound of the the live piano.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Persona dealers