Open Baffle vs Box

I am a Spatial X3 owner and I must say, these are the real deal. No apologies offered for ANY genre of music. They do it all equally well.

Oz

agreed and unfortunately I only know what I read. I, too am an apartment dweller and might be forever which is where Spatials we’re first recommended to me. I’ve put it out there on the Spatial forum that I’d like to hear them from a local and in 30 minutes I’d know what I want to know about them. Seems there are no locals who have them who also post there.

i keep scrubbing them off my list but they keep being re-added. On paper they check all the boxes (with bass being the unknown quantity). If I could just add subs then I’d go that route.

I recently acquired a pair of Maggie .7s and believe they might better fit your needs in an apartment, especially if max SPL is a concern. Unlike the other Maggies I've heard (1.7 & 3.7), the .7s produce real midbass punch, and seem a lot less current hungry. I drive mine with a 160 watt/ch/4 ohms amp. The VU meters rarely peg above 50 watts - that's in a room of about 1365' cubed. 

The Spatial M4s liked to be played loud and I often found myself nudging the volume knob until I was pushing 95db peaks. It's not like they sound anemic at low volume like many speakers; it's just that they urge you to keep cranking, probably because they have super-high power handling and are capable of loading a small auditorium. Not once did they reach a distorted playback level before my ears gave up first. The Sapphires have different drivers of course, so could have completely different behavior for all I know. 

With the .7s, I find the 70-75db range sufficient for most listening. That wasn't the case with 1.7s which wanted to play at 80db+.

I would take the M4s over 1.7s and 3.7s any day, but the .7s are a different animal and I consider them competitive with the entry-level Spatials. 

If you have the space (ie they can be very large) and you don't mind the looks (look ma, no box!) then open baffles are certainly worth a try for the sheer life-like freedom in sound that they offer. Much like open backed v closed back headphones.

What boxes do to the signal isn't pretty whichever way you look at it, you can always hear it, especially in the mids. No such thing as a silent loudspeaker cabinet, though some, like the Harbeth range do try awfully hard.

There are quite a few interesting designs where the midrange unit is backless combined with the bass driver in a box. For me it's telling that Siegfried Linkwitz eventually settled for an open baffle / box combination for his ultimate design. 

Sadly the complexities of getting an open baffle/dipole design to integrate well are no less than those for box speakers.

OB Bass is much more pitch accurate and defined than box bass. The only other bass design that comes close is a true horn loaded design.

Oz

First, my room is volumetrically large with no discernible backwall reinforcement. My box speaker experience includes; Genesis Vs, Usher 6371s, Nearfield Pipedream Accoustics (sans sub woofers), Swan Diva 6s. For OBs; Accoustat 2+2s (2 close friends had custom frame Accoustat 10s, but in very large rooms, both reinforced with dual subs), Magnepan 3.5Rs with and without subs, and currently Emerald Physics KC IIs (with and without subs), and a pair of EP 2.8s on their way (dual 15" + 12" coax drivers).


I have a EP BOM, but the SVS Ultra and Plus subs just don’t marry well without an expensive 3 way active XO; I blew through 4 cheap active XOs, but when they worked, well, there was some magic there.


Unless you are buying huge planar speakers, bass is not likely to have the impact of cone drivers in OB speakers

What I recently discovered was of the many amps I had in the last 4+ years, RIc Shultz’s EVS 1200 has the mid-bass and bass authority none of the others had. I have owned the KCIIs for 3+ years but never heard them as cohesive top to bottom as they sound with 100+ hours on the EVS 1200. This amp could be magic on Maggies as well. A few maggie owners have chimed in that the new IcePower class D is giving them the best sound they've had