Grills OFF or Grills ON ???

Depends on the grill, obviously. Some fabric is so light and open that it has no effect. In some cases the speaker system may have been "voiced" with the grill on, so its removal will brighten the sound, perhaps excessively. Subwoofer sound penetrates walls, so a grill cloth should be no problem.

Your cats are badly behaved. You should train them. My only problem with cats, when we had one, was that it would climb up my Magneplanar speakers and sit on the top. Fortunately there was enough clearance between the grill cloth and the diaphram so that no damage was done. I trained the cat.

I generally concur, grills off.

One pair of my loudspeakers, the Coincidents, don't even come with grills. The other, the Frieds(old generation), have grills, but they're stashed away.

Interestingly enough, in auditioning the new Frieds, I initially found them strident to the point where I preferred them with the grills on. That almost never happens to me.

The grills of the speakers generally have acoustically transparent fabric which does not change the tonal characteristics of the sound. I owned maggies for six years and I remember I had to take off the cloth for checking the inside of the speker for fixing the wires on the mylar and I did listen to them without the cloth in place. I could not make out the difference. I was a bit surprised since I expected them to sound different. Later I did read bout it in some brochure of Magnepan and sure enough they had mentioned it clearly that they use acoustically transparent fabric.

Paradigm's state in their catalog that the grills should be on when evaluating their speakers (Paradigm Reference Studio 40 v.2).

If the speakers come with a grill which is meant to be easily removed and put back on, you actually have an option there, use it the way you want and what suits your own ears. Wanna play it safe? Go with what the manufacturer says, they are usually right!

Grilles off sounds best, generally.

cat problem can be cured with a couple of 12-ga. shells of 00-buckshot and an appropriate delivery method. (An over-under preferred for best aesthetics.) LOL

-Ed

I too have an inside cat that did damage to my speakers, ONLY ONCE!!! I use the Roman Audio Centurions, 8" 2-way floor standing speaker, that she (the cat) saw her reflection in the gloss black finish and pounced at. The end result was that she tore the surround on one of the 8" drivers, I never put the grills on. So, needless to say, she wound up at the vet's office and got declawed, on all fours. When we got her home, having her declawed seemed to really calm her down. I informed my wife that if I caught, or seen, the cat chewing on any of my cables, the cat would suffer a fate similar to what Ed_sawyer described. Since then, we have moved and I now have a room all to myself, no cats allowed!!!!!