Okay, the gloves are off. Let the fur fly

Okay, guys, I think that you all are presenting some great reasons for your choices. Contrary to what any may think, I don't hate box multi-way speakers. I also agree with those who said things about the tradeoffs being personal choices and even those who felt that my idea of musical truth was different than theirs, with both being valid for each individual. I very highly admire those who valued their ears' judgment over all else. To Onhwy61, who questioned my motives for this thread, my reason was to see how seasoned audiophiles come to make their decisions on a tough issue like this and to see what criteria are most important to these people(all of you) in speakers and systems as a whole. And to see if I was using faulty reasoning in my decision process that I could not see myself. I am impressed with the depth and scope of your responses and feel proud to be associated with such strong minded and knowledgable folks. I would love to hear some of the super systems that some of you have assembled. And I have shared much info on several threads about mine, and why I took the approach I did. If I didn't think that the one-way system was good, I wouldn't have promoted it as strongly as I did. The reason being that I wanted to share the experience with all of you, as well as my reasoning behind it. I like to post threads that are thought provoking and controversial, because it seems they get the best ideas flowing. I've become a great fan of this forum and love to participate in the discussion, even if I may seem highly opinionated. I thank you all for your participation and valued opinions and look forward to more discussion and great listening with you all in the future.

In reality, most single driver systems are compromised in dealing with the real world business of playing a full orchestra. It is my opinion, that the quality of the bass, can in a large sense determine the quality of the upper ranges on a loudspeaker. Unless a single driver speaker,(Quad), is crossed over to a capable and dynamic woofer system, the reproduction will in fact be compromised. Real world live music, does not sound lightweight and lacking in dynamics. The fundamentals in weight and authority in the bass regions are mandatory if you ever hope to "be in the ballpark" of the live event. Since I have yet to hear a single driver do all of these things, I am with Bishopwill on this issue.........Frank

Twl, given some of the responses here, i'm going to start another thread. It is related to the comments here but is somewhat of a different subject. As such, i don't want to dilute this one too much or steer it completely off course. Look for one titled "SPL, dynamics and bottom end". Sean
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Just a quick story: Some fifteen or twenty years ago, I worked in an acoustics lab where we decided we wanted some realistic sounding speakers. We grabbed a B&K lab condeser mic and a Nagra tape recorder and recorded one of us reading a passage from a book. Then about 6 of us went from one stereo shop to another having the person read the passage while standing next to a speaker and playing the tape through a Crown amp (Nagra, Crown, and cables constant for all stores). We went back with several pairs of Dahlquist DQ10s. -- Now this issue of truth. Seems to me that my system (no longer using DQ10s) is capable of creating an illusion of a solo cello that really pleases me. I have no idea if it sounds anything like the cello that made the recording. I'm also not sure that it matters. Cheers.

Danner, thanks for the story. I find it to be quite believable. Only two problems though:

1) Crown amps are great for pro sound, but they typically just don't sound "good" : ) At least your test method ruled out a LOT of variables.

2) Dahlquist speakers are not "realistic". You can only get those from the Tandy Corporation : )

Sean
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