Something missing?

perhaps getting a nice pair of quality horn speakers will satisfy you better in the dynamics and impact department! i would suggest a pair of jbl 4430 or 4435 to spice up your life! i know exactly what you are speaking of though i dont know much about the speakers you have i do know that horns do what you are asking. they give you "the you are there" presentation instead of the hifi presentation. the efficency of the horn makes all the difference!

I quite agree with Ditusa - a cymbal crash is intense and very loud in real life. Horns will do it. Intense transients from percussion is where most systems fail most noticeably. Even Piano (a percussive instrument) often sounds to soft. Change your cables if you like but I think Ditusa hit the nail on the head.

Please list your cables: speaker, interconnects, and power cords and where they are connected. Are you using a power conditioner and how is it used?

Note that the hornspeakers Ditusa recommends use a fairly wide-pattern constant-directivity horn; these are imho a cut and a half above your average hornspeakers, and two cuts above your average prosound hornspeakers.

The JBL 4430 and 4435 studio monitors generate a reverberant field that has essentially the same spectral balance as the first-arrival sound. Guess what... so do the MBLs. And... so do live cymbals!

Now the MBL's will give a higher ratio of reverberant to direct sound than the 4430/4435 does, which is in my opinion desirable. On the other hand, the JBLs will give you better dynamic contrast than the MBLs... also desirable, so it's a trade-off.

In my opinion the JBL model 4430 is an extremely intelligent design, and even though it's over 25 years old it's still acoustically and psychoacoustically more advanced than most speakers on the market.

I think that serious students of loudspeaker design should know about the JBL model 4430. And Pedrillo, if your inquisitiveness is any indication, you fall into that category! Here's a link to a technical article written by the speaker's designers, some of the top audio engineers in the world at that time:

http://www.pispeakers.com/AES_v31_n6_p408.pdf

Best wishes,

Duke
dealer/manufacturer/JBL 4430 fan