System that sounds so real it is easy to mistaken it is not live

@lewm There was a time when I had a subscription to Wireless World. Shiny cover, but everything inside was pretty rough black and white print on cheap paper. The small ads were the very best - all those 'guaranteed' tiny things to build. It was what the subscribers to Popular Electronics moved onto when they went hardcore, just as a few years later I moved from Populat Photography to Amateur Photographer.

I'm afraid the whole world of hobby magazines at a well-stocked newsagents is now a thing of the past. For those that remember such times, the hi-fi equivalents would be going from Stereophile to Glass Audio or Positive Feedback.

@rauliruegas , sorry if I F-ed that up. I don't always read things right. Your a little more difficult for me to understand sometimes.  You are one of a few that I have some confidence in their hearing and technological shrewdness. I know for a fact you have not heard 8 foot ESLs at their best just because our opinions do not line up. It may not be your Absolute Sound but you should understand how they could easily be a contender for some people. 

@dogberry , Do you remember what the Absolute Sound looked like in the beginning?  It was a cheesy little digest book without advertising . I loved it that way. Some how it had more importance back then. Harry Pearson was the first journalist that understood us. It was that search for the ultimate performance based on the sonic presentation of a system. Harry knew what he wanted to hear even if he had difficulty describing it like the rest of us. More difficult is, how do you get there?  This is the eternal curse of the audiophile and the source of much argument. The problem is, our experience varies so much based on what we have heard, that our opinions are skewed. If we all had the same experience of the very best systems in the very best rooms our opinion would probably be very much the same. This might make life boring. 

@lewm Back when it was a tiny paperback sized magazine? Of course. You have awoken a strange memory. One Saturday I drove to Halifax, NS, to pick up a $2k set of Monster speaker cables (still have them, half as thick as my wrist and sound no better than 14G wire....) and for some reason I decided to go to a food court under a no longer existing mall and try the poutine I'd been hearing about. I don't remember the poutine, which I have never eaten since, but I do remember the pink cover of the issue of TAS I read as I wielded my plastic fork. Maybe some things are best forgotten.

@lewm , I was not trying to give you a lesson on TL design, Just my opinion. I have heard some excellent TLs from Celestion back in the day and more currently Sanders also under an ESLs!   MDf is OK for a woofer, but not for a subwoofer actually plywood used intelligently is stiffer just a lot more expensive. My balanced force subs use 1.5 inch cabinet grade maple plywood.  IMHO it takes an entirely different approach designing a speaker that can punch out the appropriate energy from 18 Hz to 125 Hz. It is not my opinion that speakers that can do so will get your entire house shaking. This is a matter of fact. Turn it up to 90 dB and and play pure sine wave test tones from 20 to 40 Hz and walk outside and you will hear, at many frequencies, your house rattle and buzz. I have a brick house with some Hardy Plank siding in the rear and it rattles and buzzes, not to mention everything in the house like plates and wine glasses. It took me a month of playing around to stop all the sonic anomalies coming from a Stewart theater screen and they reputedly make some of the best. I had to silicone all the air vents in the house to get then to stop. At least in my media room I can not hear any of the symphony the subs are making in the rest of the house with the volume up. I think this is the best one can expect with subs that have that kind of energy. Balanced force subs may not shake themselves but this says nothing of the rest of the house and it's contents. My only possible thoughts in situations where someone is telling me their environment does not rattle are, the person has no idea what they are listening to, the person is very clever and managed to control their environment via various techniques and finally, their system does not produce realistic sub bass. The specifications of the vast majority of speakers means absolutely nothing. The speaker's ability to make sub bass at one meter says absolutely nothing in regards to the speaker's capability to make realistic levels in a normally sized room. It is the main reason we resort to subwoofers. The problem for most manufacturers is that making an ultra high performance subwoofer requires a level of construction insanity and equipment support that the sub becomes very uncompetitive from a cost and complexity standpoint. They want to sell subs to as many people as they can. Us truly discriminating audiophiles are not a very large target audience. As I have said in other posts, the only sub I have heard make great sub bass in a normal room environment  is the smaller Magico Q sub and for some reason they do not make it any more. I also think their Q sub were not the absolute sound. I still think the basic design can be better, even less cost effective but better. 

I have a Lenco L78 with an Ortofon AS-212 tonearm. It has an SAE 1000LT cartridge that is comparable to a $1K cartridge. It is a HOMC. I use Revel Performa M22 speakers with a tweeter upgrade. I use a rebuilt and upgraded Pioneer SX-34 with best tubes. It does sound live to me.