Which speakers did you find bright, fatiguing or just disappointing in some way?


OK, controversial subject but it needs asked. I'm curious for your experiences, mainly in your home, not a dealer and esp. not a show demo
greg7
Fortunately, in my years of purchasing stereo equipment, I have never purchased speakers without first listening to them for an extended period of time.  Since I've been an audiophile for many decades, I can honestly say the the most fatiguing speaker that I have ever trialed were the Bose 901's.   They were "okay" for about ten minutes but became very poor to the ears after a full twenty minutes.  I ended up purchasing Quad ESL-57's after selling my ESS Translinear II's and AMT-4's.
They were from Radio Shack back in the 70's and we were cranking some Ted Nugent and then there was no Nuge.........
@whipsaw 

You still havent answered what reason i would have to be dishonest. You have nothing to support your allegations.
Of the many archived posts relating to the subject speaker, the "bright and harsh" complaint is almost never found
and i have already told you why that could be. Johnson may have had any negative posts deleted at his request as he did with mine. You admitted this is what he did with my posts so you dont know if it had happened on other occasions. Johnson was an active forum user here and on other forums and any posts that related to his speakers would attract his attention. I recall that any time something negative was posted, a handful of his followers would show up on the forum. I suspect Johnson may have been contacting these followers and asking them to post positive remarks to counteract any negative ones. This happened on various forums.
The specific criticism is very uncommon, hence the logical question of whether or not the problem may have been related to something other than the speakers themselves.
Nonsense. You wouldn't know how common it was unless you knew how many people had listened to GMA and out of those what percentage found them to sound bright and edgy. I have also found that most of the GMA  supporters were believers in Johnsons theories on time coherence. Given that to date this idea has never been found to be important or audible it diminishes the credibility of their opinion about how the speaker sounds. 

I have also told you several factors that caused it to be bright. You have failed to address these factors and put the blame somewhere else even though the reasons I gave were the most obvious explanation.

You have unfortunately lost the argument now. 
Any speaker made after 1990 that has been with soundstaging and air as a main criterion is all of the things you want to avoid.

@aewarren I remember SpeakerLab. And I remember as a teen the pair of DAS6 that me and a friend moved out of my pops shop and back to the apt to set up in my room. He was not happy at first but never took them back or really said much about them. I had those for quite some time, pretty decent speaker for $0!

As for the original question, Klipsch have always been bright and meh to my ears for the most part. Various JBL designs, Meridian, Martin Logan (1998, 20005-2010), were all on the brighter side of things and just didn’t do it for me.

I’ve managed to get a hold of a pair of speakers that I can’t describe as being dull, bright, boring, unexciting, lethargic, or simply lacking, to my ears. I’m mulling over inserting a tube based pre-amp into the signal chain, but that’s just to see if I like that sound in my setup. Aside from that, I enjoy spending my spare time finding new music to listen to and not obsessing over "am I hearing enough detail" "is the sound edgy",etc.

I’m near Santa Clara CA. I need to check out a retailer and hear some stuff. Any recommendations?