Need suggestions on bookshelf speaker upgrades

I liked the Paradigm S2's whenever i've heard them, but the price increases over the years (that goes for most brands anyways) kinda made me forget about them. Do wavetouch speakers look normal in person? Online they look like penaudio speakers with a cereal bowl and sharpie stuck on with some fishing wire. Vapor audio gets brought up a lot here, and I am curious about them, but i've read too many posts that read like adverts.

Limo, sorry, I have the small 300 ones in my bedroom system. Interesting thread. I thought it was going to die after milhorn called me a liar, lol....

3/25 Ctsooner:

When you said your speaker wasn't set up correctly, I agreed that you were probably correct.

I didn’t say "my speaker is not set up correctly?" It’s your words on 3/21.

Milhorn you've already made a fool of yourself in your rude responses to my posts. You can try and twist words as much as you want or quote or do whatever you want, but in the end, you looked very foolish in your posts in this thread. You really should have stopped while you were behind. This irony is that you lost the chance at a few sales based on some emails people sent me offline about how they'd never buy from a start up company who's owner posted such rude and uncalled for comments. I'm very happy that one of the posters like your speaker after it's been broken in for a very long time.

Since you call your speaker the most beautiful sounding speaker in the world, you should send me a pair and I'll get a few of the posters from this board from NY/NJ/Ct area come to a store and we'll do a shoot out with not just Vandersteen, as I posted about, but also 4 or so other brands. Since everyone has different ears and likes different speakers we can see if everyone agrees in what you are selling. Want to put your money where your mouth is? Seriously, you can be there too obviously and we could even set it all up with a black sheet etc... so it's done properly. Now THAT would be something that folks would love to do I bet.

Any takers? You may just make a believer out of me and some others. If not, give it up already please.

Staying on topic NY, which speakers are on your short list so far and why? Keep in mind your system and especially your room. As anyone realizes the room is HUGE no matter what one or two folks may say as there are always going to be reflections and scattering of sound that will hit your ear at different times that can smear and do other nasty things that will ruin your sound. Bass especially.

Since imaging is a top priority of NYaudio98, let me toss out a few comments.

Good imaging would include two attributes in abundance: Precise localization of sound sources, and a sense of immersion in the acoustic space of the recording.

To a certain extent, these two attributes trade off against one another. The more powerful the in-room reverberant field, in general the greater the sense of envelopment and immersion, but at the expense of precise sound source localization.

If we can introduce a fairly long delay between the first-arrival sound and the onset of a powerful, diffuse reverberant field, we can come very close to "best of both worlds". In a big room this is something a good dipole can do well, provided it's out from the wall far enough to get about 10 milliseconds' worth of path-length-induced time delay on the backwave. That calls for about five feet of "breathing room" behind the speakers. Obviously this isn't practical in a small room, and we have to get creative.

If any of you are going to be at T.H.E. Show in Newport Beach in a few days, stop by Hilton Room 920 (Electra-Fidelity) and see what is arguably the current state-of-the-art in small-room-friendly speakers that can deliver that sense of immersion and envelopment along with good sound source localization.

If the goal is approximating the illusion of a live concert, this sense of immersion is arguably a key factor. Another is good dynamic contrast. Another is that unmistakable aroma of weed. Any two out of these three should get you most of the way there.

Duke
dealer/manufacturer