Warm romantic & detailed


Good morning Gentlemen & ladies... 

I'm just starting to toy with idea of replacing my Focal 1038's... No matter how I treat my room, or what equipment I throw at it I just can't seem to tame the harsh highs on this speaker. 

I'd like to stay in the same price range of the Electra's (7/8k), I don't mind buying used, the musts for me at this point are: Warm, romantic, yet detailed... It would be beautiful to just sit and listen and not have ear fatigue after 15 minutes of listening. 

Can you please recommend something? 
jeffinnh76
I had a similar issue with my old Mirage M3-Si speakers.  I was considering a couple of the Focal speakers but again, a metal tweeter is not what I wanted.  I really liked the Sonus Faber signature sound and came close to making that purchase.  However, I made my decision and recently took delivery of the new model from Dynaudio, the Contour 60i.  A wonderful soft dome tweeter that is very detailed but never overly bright.  And the midrange is perfectly forward, yet balanced, and never harsh.  Vocals, wind instruments, string instruments all sound so nicely balanced and natural.  A real pleasure for long listening sessions.  They play very well with all sorts of music genres.  And when you ask them to deliver on high volume with Classic Rock music, they excel. The Contour 60i has some improvements over the preceding model, the Contour 60.  But the differences are not night & day.  If you can find an authorized dealer who still has the Contour 60 remaining as a floor demo model they can be had for a very reasonable price.  I have recently seen $6,500 to $7,000 posted for those demo speakers at several dealer locations, Nationally.  Anyway, the sound quality is my opinion, of course.  But I wanted to share that I had the same issues as you and was able to solve them by getting the Dynaudio speakers.  Best of luck to you.
Jeffinh76, these are all 6 of one and a half dozen of the other. You really have to listen. Speakers are the most important and variable part of any system. You got stuck with a set of speakers you don't like. don't do it again. Excepting speakers like the Sound Labs and Magneplanars. All these other speakers have similar modes of dispersion using dynamic drivers in a point source situation. They are essentially omnidirectional and the most prone to room interaction. Differences between them are due to different drivers, crossovers and tuning method. These are all going to affect the frequency response of the speaker more than anything else. Planar dipoles are significantly different as are horn loaded speakers like the Klipsch heritage series. Only you know what you like. Listen to the three types, planar, horn and dynamic to decide which type you want then nail it down to one speaker. 
Find out where the nearest high end stores are to you and travel if you have to. I live in New Hampshire and I will travel to NYC to hear stuff on a Saturday have a nice dinner, hotel sex with the wife and travel back the next day. Don't listen to salespeople or us for that matter. Our opinions as to what speaker sounds best are based on what we like, not what you like and salespeople can be helpful just let them sell you anything. You sell yourself.
You will never tame those speakers.   If you went with the Proac Tablet 10's ( they are not expensive ) you could eventually pick up a 300B amp and have more of the sweet involving music you are looking for...someone had mentioned Reynaud speakers, I heard them a number of years ago and they to are extremely natural sounding....
Just a note warm and natural sounding speakers never sound " detailed " they sound rich and engaging...
Best
Jim
I finally went with Meridian DSP speakers. While they don’t sound like they have the same detail it’s all there but in the music instead of in front of it. Good luck with your system.

its interesting that you don’t mention the front end? While I agree those speakers are intolerant of average recordings sometimes a hybrid amp can tame hard speakers.