Here's my story. I owned a HiFi store in Providence, RI in the 80s. We had a huge customer base of professional classical musicians. They would come into the store and audition speakers....KEFs, EPI, Advent, AR, etc. We had a very well designed switching system that could balance the SPL of the speakers using a sound pressure meter for A-B comparison. As we would play various, extremely popular speakers they would sit there patiently. Just about 100% of these musicians would light up when we would play B&O Red Line speakers, Dahlguist DQ10s and Magnepans......the only thing these speakers had in common was some form of "time alignment". The drivers were "aligned" in some fashion or in the case of the Magnepans, a single panel in space. They reaction always amazed me. And this happened time and time again (no pun intended) I remember reading an article many years ago about 15% of the population being very susceptible to what was referred to as "time distortion" in loudspeakers. I suggest that folks that really know what live music or maybe their particular instrument is supposed to sound like are among that 15%.......I'm extremely impressed with my recent acquired KEF LS50 Metas and my Magnepan MMGs among all the hundreds of speakers I've had the pleasure of auditioned in a 50 year career in HiFi.
Recently , after listening to the Metas for a few months, I was smitten by the concept of Point Source loudspeakers. This led me to a number of Single Driver, no crossover designs that are receiving rave reviews. The brand that really got my attention is Pearl Acoustics and the Sibelius speaker. Since I couldn't afford tio buy a pair, I decided to build what some consider the DIY version...The Pensil 10.2.....Totally blew me away! So simple to build....So easy to listen to! (You can read all about my build here...
So where is this going.....Is there any validity in anything I've written? Has anyone else experienced similar?
