Paradigm Persona series

@ctsooner 

You are correct.  Troy and Dave (no shocker) think they are one of approximately 5-6 dealers in the country that know how to set-up a speaker and experiment with electronics.

Call them what you will, bright, detailed, accurate etc.  That's what they are.  NO one said they were bad speakers. In fact, I'm sure they measure quite well. Accurate, uncolored etc.

They are fast, they are very detailed.  If you like that, they are a heck of a speaker to audition.

But the bottom line is they are very much on the bright/accurate/fast/detailed end of the spectrum.

Though, I'm sure some isoacoustics footers, and uber expensive cables will warm them right up. ;-)

So ahofer heard the Personas at Audio Doctor and still found them bright. Apparently, there are no dealers in the country that can tame the brightness. Maybe Audiotroy can chime in here and blame his hearing for the perceived brightness. When I have heard the Personas, they have sounded bright to me as well. 

When I heard the 5F with a Lyngdorf 2170 it sounded rather bad. I really wanted to like the Lyngdorf and it was more the reason I went to that demo. I excluded the amp section of the Lyngdorf by going preamp out to a Simaudio 860A amp. We had to do some sound degrading RCA to XLR conversions but nevertheless the sound was very agreeable to me and that is the reason for me to purchase the Persona 3F. I will not get  the Simaudio amp I demoed but something lower priced with similar sound characteristics.

I have heard a lot of speakers, being close to Los Angeles, makes this easy. So it is not like I do not know what is out there. Different strokes.

Csmgolf,  the setup did not sound bright at all, compared to other speakers the Persona's had far greater clarity then the Kef R series which we also demoed. 

Yes it is true these are not laid back speakers they are however remarkably transparent, fast and accurate and so if you prefer a warmer more recessed sound then this kind of accuracy will not be for you. 

We also demoed the 3F with the more expensive Naim NAC 272 dac and preamp and a 250dr, and then  we added the XPS 2 power supply and the system started to sound really magnificent. 

In retrospect the demo was a bit flawed on the higher end Naim as we could not use Roon directly  into the NAC 272 and had to use another streamer with an spdif cable to play the test files which were storred on a usb thumb drive. 

Also there is a way to change the sound quality radically on the Naim Uniti products if you are using Naim which is to ouput your PCM files as DSD which the Uniti can handle and boom now you have the elevated midrange and softer top end of DSD decoding we didn't do that either.

Normally our demos last for 2-3 hours this demo was a bit brief  so we didn't even scratch the surface of what we can do and how we can tune the speakers to match someone's taste.

There is also a huge range of gear to choose from in our shop, we started with the Naim Uniti for one reason which we Mr. Hofer also heard the Wilson Sabrinas on the same amplifier. 

We never went to the Krell K300i which is a very warm integrated nor did we listen to the Antem STR amp/preamp combo which also sounds really outstanding on the Anthem. 

You are welcome to visit our shop and see for yourself

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Paradigm Persona, Krell, Naim, Anthem dealers

I listened to them toed in a bit, and if you look around you'll read a bunch of reviewers/users are setting them up facing straight ahead to avoid an overly bright presentation. Apart from the brightness, I think the Paradigms are *very* stiff competition for the much more expensive Wilson Sabrina.

Actually ahofer said in this post on this thread that they sounded bright in your shop. Of course you would say they didn't sound bright. He said they did. Plus, bright is bright and is not accurate. The Stereophile measurements show it, the measurements ahofer linked show it, and my experiences listening to it match what the measurements show. If you like that, great but don't say that it is accurate.