Speakers free of grain, glare and steel?

IMO and in my system high-hats and brushes sound like they should with the Spendor speakers I've owned. In reality they will only sound as good as what your upstream components can deliver to your speakers, your amps in particular. The Spendor's are pretty neutral, so they're not going to get in the way as much as say some electronic components might. As for overly polite, I don't think so. These speakers can rock if they have too. I've played mine loud with rock and alternative music and they chugged along just fine.

The Fritz Carbon 7's are very nice speakers. I had a chance to listen to them for a few days.

Unsound,

"Walsh" drivers are an operating principle, not a specific design.

The older OHMs as well as the newer "Walsh" line models all employ Walsh drivers of different designs. So do German Physiks and a few others these days as well.

Each has strengths and weaknesses and user preferences will vary accordingly as is always the case.

Of course I think you know all this already, so just a reminder....

If you can find a pair of original OHM Fs in assured good working order in the target price range, they would also likely fit the OPs bill. Hoever these tend to be delicate devices and service and support for these nowadays is sparse though available, for a price.

Mapman, I disagree. Not all of OHM's speakers feature bending wave Walsh drivers, the DDD drivers that German Physiks uses doesn't have the mechanical cross-overs that the Walsh drivers do.

What people's experience been with and without Merlin RCS, standard and master? Do they generally make a difference, and if so, how much? Are they more effective with tube or solid state amps?

Unsound,

OK, you can disagree but the fact is they ARE Walsh drivers, and pretty good sounding ones at that.

How much one design bends waves versus the others is another question and subject to debate. Walsh drivers, even the original (and flawed from a reliability perspective) OHM Walsh models do not rely solely on wave bending. That is also a documented fact, although its true as best I know that wave bending is a function unique to a Walsh driver

Walsh drivers produce wave bending more at higher frequencies so Walsh drivers that are designed to cover higher frequencies, like the DDDs will most likely tend to do more of that than the OHM Walshes, where the Walsh driver covers only up to 7-8 Khz or so by design.

All OHM Walsh style speakers I have ever heard exhibit the sonic qualities that the OP seeks in the stated price range, though to different extents. That's what matters for this thread, not how many waves are bent or not. That's a topic for another discussion perhaps.

Granted, wave bending is a relatively poorly understood topic in home speaker design. If it's "magic" one seeks, perhaps wave bending Walsh drivers fit the bill best in that sense. Although some may argue that its magical how the newer OHMs sound as good as they do. I'd be willing to label John Strohbeen (the designer) as a "magician", in that sense.