I think Magnepan and Martin-Logan engineers who eschew boxes and simplify the crossover to first order: a capacitor to the tweeter and a coil to the mid-bass regard the very complicated crossovers, notch filters that attempt to tame the wild variability of impedance with respect to frequency and the bracing of cabinets to try to minimize the effect of a speaker varying the pressure on a cabinet as what John Northrup called "inventing rubber gloves for leaky fountain-pens." These simplifications and auditioning made my choice very easy. But these first-order crossover designs and their planar diaphragms take extra power to duplicate the volume of the orchestra and singers in an opera house. I also like the simplicity of the single ended triode amplifier which, in the case of the usual choices like the 300-B, are not powerful enough. So if you want both the open purity of a planar speaker and that SET refinement you have to drive the speakers with something like an 822-A single ended triode amplifier, which is not as difficult as you think to design and build.
How do you know what a good speaker is?
Frequency response for high end speakers at every price level is usually relatively flat. The differences in audible sound quality reported by audiophiles is disproportionate to the differences in frequency response between different speakers therefore frequency response cannot be a very significant factor in what we're hearing.
Distortion is usually below 0.5% so again the same reasoning applies.
I'm not convinced that polar response is quite as important as is sometimes claimed.
If you look at the specs of most ultra high end loudspeakers, there's no hard evidence provided by the manufacturers to justify their claims that their speaker is vastly superior.
And if there was it would need to be independently verified.
So how does the consumer know how close any given loudspeaker is to the ideal loudspeaker? How do we know how close a loudspeaker is to recreating the sound of a violin, cello, piano, human voice, or anything else?
What makes a magico vastly different from a yg or Wilson? On the other hand if the difference between these speakers is extremely small then why is there such a discrepancy in opinions and why do we need a yg and a magico and Wilson and tidal audio and b&w etc on the market if they're all so similar?
Distortion is usually below 0.5% so again the same reasoning applies.
I'm not convinced that polar response is quite as important as is sometimes claimed.
If you look at the specs of most ultra high end loudspeakers, there's no hard evidence provided by the manufacturers to justify their claims that their speaker is vastly superior.
And if there was it would need to be independently verified.
So how does the consumer know how close any given loudspeaker is to the ideal loudspeaker? How do we know how close a loudspeaker is to recreating the sound of a violin, cello, piano, human voice, or anything else?
What makes a magico vastly different from a yg or Wilson? On the other hand if the difference between these speakers is extremely small then why is there such a discrepancy in opinions and why do we need a yg and a magico and Wilson and tidal audio and b&w etc on the market if they're all so similar?