B&W 703 - How to tame the highs?

When it comes to using these speakers for HT purposes, I honestly can't find any fault - even if I try. It makes me wonder if designing speakers to reproduce movies and music requires a compromise in one to benefit the other.

What you are discovering is Audio Compression...certain forms of music are highly compressed. Eva cassidy is not. Movies are not. This is why they sound good on your system.

Hyper compressed rock, pop and alternative is common these days and it will sound fatiguing. Switching to a less accurate speaker with laid back midrange and smooth warm sound may help...but it is a "band aid" not a cure...besides do you want to put a band-aid over the beautiful sounding Live at Blues Alley - just so you can play Metallica without having to cover your ears - the choice is yours...

See this Turn Me Up for more information.

Speakers do not have to be overly warm or inaccurate to play compressed music without ensuing listening fatigue.

I am not sure if I was clear - I don't mean compressed as in iTunes or MP3 - I meant compression of the sound by the mastering engineer to give you a "hot" loud sound...that is they deliberately kill the dynamics using limiters, which also adds all kinds of distortion.

If you are having success with Silverline Bolero then IMHO it is probably related to the enormous hole in the midrange from 1 KHz to 5 KHz. This is a fantatsic audiophile speaker but nobody could be criticized for remarking that this is inaccurate reproduction, of a kind which would definitely help reduce harshness and fatigue (many other audiophile speakers are designed this way too and they sound great - google "BBC Dip"). Thanks for helping to clarify what I really meant to say.

Change the type of music I listen to. Not likely to happen as I grew up listening to the popular music of the 70's, 80's and 90's which was mainly Rock.

Actually most of the 70's and 80's rock music is fairly good - apart from Steve Lillywhite stuff and a few other "headbanger" producer/engineers. It is in the late 90's where is starts to get really bad and unlistenable on audiophile quality gear.

May I suggest a PEQ? You can program a PEQ with several curves...one to suit compressed rock music, for example with a broad 6 db dip around 3 KHz and going from 1 to 5 Khz. Whilst storing a different curve in memory for "Eva Cassidy high quality" type stuff and for when you watch a movie (movies are deliberately mixed to be dynamic as they are targetted at good cinema systems not car radio listeners). That way you can have your cake an eat it too!!

Another alternative would be two sets of speakers...A and B and switch between the two depending on your mood/requirement.

Unfortunately
1) there is no way to fix awful recordings...of course it begs the question why bother with a costly system to listen to awful recordings when anything cheap will generally do better.
2) while you can PEQ down - it is much harder to PEQ UP with good effect - I won't go into detail but it tends to sound better in the down direction which makes a transducers life easy rather than the other way round - so if your speaker has no midrange to start with then it is hard to correct as it may be a transducer limitation due to compression or an inherent odd radiation pattern - whilst a speaker with flat midrange and good dispersion can be easily EQ'd down a bit to get a desired effect.