The very best speakers disappear.
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Excellent addition to this discussion.
Your post is timely and helpful towards understanding of ~~The Speaker Choice Dilemma~~
Can we take your ~~disappear~ to say, ~voices the music as close as possible to the very actual studio recording~~ provided the studio engineers are capable of producing high fidelity~~.
WE all know there are a few lousey quality recording in the catalogue.
I would add, what speaker can present music, witha certain natural-ness, neutral-ness, channeling the dynamics which are in the actual studio performance, ,
Further
w/o the listener feeling his sensibilities are being attacked in any aggressive manner.
lastly, zero fatigue , or as close to zero as possible.
In my rather limited experience of xover/traditional designs, most have not meet these criteria.
Sure xover/traditional low efficiency designs might sound fantastic to the listener (I thought the world of my Philips 375 2 ways, , then the Thors were The Ultimate) but when enters the room a high fidelity wide band/FR driver, now the listener is made fully aware of all the faults and distortions added to the music by his most perfect xover/traditional design.
FR are the new kids on the block and they mean business.
This is how I see the future of audio comos,
1) That speakers will be understood as The Most Critical Component
( King Amps will now have to , regretfully to many of you here on audiogon, take a distant 2nd place in terms of critical importance ina audio system)
2) That wide band/FR /kigh efficiency drivers will be understood as the most perfect ideally voicing driver ever engineered.
These 2 objectives/goals will take another 10+ years brought to cognition.
1st awareness, next the pondering, reflecting, last the fruits of my hopes that FR/wide band will become The 21st Century Speaker by choice.
10 years, we will see some changes take place.
The FR/wide band is comming into its own by low price drivers from Dayton, Emminence and others these past 10 years, Mostly used for car audio applications.
We owe alot to the early models , Fostex, Lowther, JBL, Seas, for important engineering which the new FR labs have built upon.
Its up to us to acknowledge these new 21st C developments and take the FR new designs into consideration for our next speaker purchase.
FR/High sens speakers are ~~Win~win~Win~Win, the only weakness, but simply, economical fixable~~ is the roll off on the high register.
But as i say, the newest high fidelity FR may actually voice the high fq's w/o the need to add a Horn tweet.
I havea budgest 8 FR arriving in 3 weeks, At that point I can make a determination, The Diatone 6.5 has severe high roll off. Miniscule fault considering everything the driver does well with mids/bass.