Seeking tales of speaker demos

@hilde45

Good advise from verdantaudio. To me, speakers are a very personal choice. So I won’t say go with brand X or Y. I can only suggest to keep couple of things in mind, pick a high efficiency speaker (atleast 92db or higher). They are much easier to drive with moderate to low power solid state or tube amps. And if possible, stick with a single driver speaker that offers full range.

To my ears, multi-driver speakers sounds bit dis-jointed due to multiple wavefronts not reaching the listener at exactly the same time. In an ideal world a speaker designer would want to design a single transducer that addresses the entire frequency range – the ideal of the single-driver speaker. That transducer would cover the lowest bass notes as well as the finest details of the upper treble.

There are quite a few speaker manufacturers that are offering single full range drivers. Once you hear a single driver speaker, it’s very unlikely you would consider anything else. I believe you’re already planning to augment the low / mid bass with a pair of REL subs.

Good luck!

Thanks @lalitk and @verdant for your very helpful comments. I'm copying the gist of them into my auditioning plan notes.

@b_limo
re: ..."Ribbons and Air Motion Tweeters (amt’s) are very fast and detailed but don’t quite have the decay characteristics that the BE tweeters in the Salks will possess"...
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Hey b_limo,
If you don’t mind sharing your research, which AMT based speakers or drivers have you evaluated and what amplification did you use to evaluate them?

@decooney , sorry for no reply, just saw this now.

My experience with AMT’s is limited to the Wharfedale evo 4.4 at RMAF where I listened to them for an hour.  I can’t recall the amplification but I really loved the sound in that room.  They seemed very detailed but didn’t quite have that decay and shimmer ghat some high end beryllium tweeters have, in my opinion.  My other AMT experience is with some Adam Tv5’s that a friend has using a pretty nice dac and treated listening area.  
As far as Ribbons, I had Monitor Audio Gold GX50’s with a Peachtree Nova 220se in addition to a different setup using a bryston 4bst.  I really love the ribbon tweeters in the Monitor Audio Speakers.

Both the AMT’s and ribbons that I’ve heard were fast and detailed.  The Monitors had some nice shimmer and good decay.  From memory, I slightly preferred the Ribbons to AMT’s.  I am a fan of a variety of tweeters as they each have certain strengths and characteristics.  I usually don’t care too much for titanium, but I do like Beryllium, ceramic, Amt’s, Ribbon, planers, plasma...

@b_limo 
Good to know on all fronts. While I've had a long exposure to AMTs since their original design in the 1970s, some material changes too.  Along with variations of AMTs from different manufacturers available on the market now all sound different from one speaker maker to the next. Fun to compare whenever possible.  Some better than others. Same with ribbons, or at least the ones I listened to over time.  I stopped building speakers and never got a chance to try Beryllium tweets, sounds like fun.  Thx.