The Shure V15 V with a Jico SAS/B stylus VS The Soundsmith Hyperion MR and Lyra Atlas SL

@mijostyn "What is a pseudo line source?"

A true line source speaker does not exist, any more than a true point source speaker can actually exist.  If they could, the energy they emit would have to be crammed into an infinitely small volume, a singularity.  Singularities are hated in physics theory.  If you can get an ounce or two of matter and cram it into a very small volume, you pretty much have the preconditions for the creation of another big-bang and a new universe.

Ribbon speakers probably come closest to a line source, but big electrostatic panels have to use geometry and / or smarts to give the illusion they behave like a point, or a line, somewhere outside the plane of the panel.

Countries with small populations like Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Slovenia can all make really good equipment.  Australia even invented WiFi.  But there is little government support or venture capital for start-ups.  The volumes are low, so prices have to be high.

The flip side is that there are very few import duties anymore.  The car industry is wide open to imports.  Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota have all stopped local manufacture quite recently.  Chinese cars will dominate very soon!

In general I can import stuff and save about 25% compared with buying the same item locally, after allowing for transport costs.

@richardbrand Not only do I have a REAL line source speaker, I have a real line source subwoofer array. Perhaps what you are talking about is the fact that most "line sources" lose their line source behavior at some low frequency depending on the height of the speaker. My system acts as a line source over more than the entire audio band from ZERO hertz to 20 kHz. There is absolutely nothing pseudo about it. Again, you need to read more about line source behavior. It is why my subwoofers are 4 feet apart and by the way there was nothing all that special about Duntech speakers. I installed a pair in a very rich person's home on Miami Beach in the late 70's when real Duntechs were still being made. They were OK for dynamic speakers. They fit the clients decor nicely. Their image was mediocre. The real company folded in the 90s I believe. 

@richardbrand A line source does not have to be thin like a ribbon. The most impressive characteristic of a liner source aside from higher acoustic power is that they do not send any sound up toward the ceiling or down towards the floor. You can make a line source tweeter only 9 inches tall. The problem is the vertical beaming is so bad you can only hear it if your ears are exactly at the same level. Now take an 8 foot ESL dipole speaker system and put it in a room with an 8 foot ceiling and you get a REAL line source that will maintain line source behavior over the entire audio band and have minimal interaction with the room. They only throw sound at the front and rear walls. My listening area has no rear wall, so I only have to deal with the front wall. When dealt with correctly the image produced is better than anything you have ever heard. Honest,

@mijostyn According to their website, your so-called ’real’ line source speaker tries to emulate the behaviour of a virtual line source situated about 3 feet behind the panel, just as Quad ESL>63 try to emulate a point source a foot behind the panel. A true point source radiates spherical soundwaves evenly from the point in every direction. A true line source radiates cylindrical soundwaves evenly from the line.

So are your subwoofers actually 12 feet from one end of their line-up to the other?

Does not having a rear wall mean your listening area radiates into free space?

I only mentioned Duntech Sovereigns because they were a D’Appolito configuration with careful time alignment that exhibits dreadful interference, despite being engineered to sound like a Quad ESL-63. John Dunlavy was a US physicist specialising in radar and wave propagation. Duntech speakers are still being built in Sydney, I suspect mainly for the Asian market.

@richardbrand I know a bunch of very smart people with terrible ideas, my brother, a PhD in aquatic acoustics from MIT being one of them. It is hard to imagine how such a smart guy can be so stupid. Anyway, the Sound Labs ESL is a full range speaker 8 feet tall with a cross section that is 45 degrees of a circle. Dipole ESLs beam like crazy and emulate a line source perfectly. It does not matter where the propagation starts. What is very neat is the image solidifies about 10 feet behind the speaker which people, non audiophiles in particular, are always amazed at. The house is an open concept design, I designed it. The rear of the media room is open to the rest of the house in a very fractured way like a big defuser. The nearest solid wall is 75 feet away. There is no modal behavior in the room at all. You still have barrier effect, the bass gets louder at the side walls.  The subwoofer array ends at the side walls forming a line source from zero to 100 Hz. The side walls are 16 feet apart. The line source behavior ends at about 200 Hz and they turn into one big point source. By then they are 48 dB down and well out of the picture. The subwoofers are perfectly time and phase aligned with the ESLs. This is done by measurement and digital delay and correction.