You might consider reading about the speakers SET lovers prefer. It's a group that focuses directly on the qualities you appear to be after. As pointed out above, many of the suggestions seem to be for "my favorite speakers" not speakers that meet your desired criteria.
What speaker – under $10k – has the best timbre and tonal qualities?
Several years ago, a prominent reviewer had this to say as he was praising the natural and life-like tonal qualities of a particular speaker:
It’s [speakers] like these that make me question the priorities of audiophiles who relegate accuracy of timbre to secondary status. How are the richness and color of instruments, voices, ensembles, and textures to be reproduced in all their infinite variety and beauty if a loudspeaker has less than accurate reproduction of timbre? What do dynamics, imaging, detail, transparency, and the like matter if voices and instruments don’t sound like themselves?
I’ve come the same realization, late in the game. I recently made a lateral move from one of the most popular of recent speaker models to a different speaker, because it sounded so much more natural and realistic in timbre. I sacrificed a touch of image precision in doing so, but it has been well worth it. The sound is so much more engaging. It’s like going from a high-resolution black and white photograph – which is very detailed and impressive – to a color version of the same photo, but with slightly less resolution. The color version offers so much more in terms of realism.
So I’m now contemplating the purchase of what I hope will be my last speakers, with the objective of realistic, natural, and rich (but not artificially warm) tone being the primary attribute.
What speakers, under $10k, would you recommend? (I’m driving them with a PrimaLuna Prologue Premium)
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I haven't heard the cube audio offerings, but they are one modern option that falls into the above category: https://refinedaudio.com/collections/cube-audio |
There are boxes and there are panels. I've owned both. Some large, some not-so-large, some efficient and dynamic, some polite and restrained. But the question at hand is timbre and tone. And here to my ear, the choice is simplified. A box will always sound like a box. There are some pretty sweet boxes out there, but at the end of the day, that box sound, however mitigated, remains. Panels, Martin Logan and Magnepan specifically, require attention to electronics (hint: current is your friend) and even more attention to room placement, but properly set up, and for timbre and tone, they are unmatched. |
- 115 posts total