what speakers do the best "disappearing act"??

Two of the three best disappearing acts I've heard were by speakers that are no longer in production.

The first was the Meridian M2. This little beauty used a pair of 5 1/2" KEF woofers and a 2" (that's not a misprint) KEF dome tweeter. This was an active system using an MTM driver layout (well before Joseph D'Appolito's landmark article in SpeakerBuilder), with fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley filters, delay-compensation in the crossover, and a sixth order (assisted) vented alignment. All this back in 1981! This little beast was absolutely holographic - the sound field extended way beyond the plane of the speakers in width and depth. I haven't been the same since.

The next speaker that did an amazing disappearing act was the Snell Type A, not sure which version (again, early 80's). This was a brilliantly designed speaker with the best anti-diffraction baffle ever made. The baffle was a two foot wide, three foot tall totally smooth surface that gently curved back from the drivers, and more or less approximated a large spherical surface. The Type A's were intended to go flush up against the rear wall, not normally a location associated with decent imaging. But on a good Sheffield Lab recording, the room seemed twice as deep. And unlike the little Meridians, the Snells had a very natural tonal balance.

Plato, there is one line of electrostatics that has very uniform dispersion with respect to frequency and a correspondingly wide sweet spot. That line is the Sound Labs, in particular the full sized models. I'd be happy to explain why if you would like.

Which brings me to the third speaker that really surprised me with its disappearing act - the Sound Lab Ultimate 1's. These huge, rigid metal-frame electrostats replicated and perhaps even surpassed the vanishing act of the little Meridian M2's. Once again, there was no sense of room boundaries, much less of speakers in the room.

To put things in perspective, I do not place holographic imaging near the top of my list of priorities. If I had to choose, I'd much rather a speaker get the timbre of instruments right rather than their position. But holographic imaging can be a lot of fun, especially when combined with correct timbre.

Honorable mention for disappearing acts goes to the Martin Logan CLS, the MBL Radialstrahler, the Spica TC-50, and the Quad 63.

for the kind of sound you like with your current setup the norh 9.0's are the best

Magneplanars, 3.6s are the ones to go for.

Martin Logans do. So do Thiel 2.3's with proper placement.

My experience is that whether or not a speaker disappears is dependent on room acoustics, location of the speaker in the room and on the remainder of the system. Any one of these facotors may limit the ability of the speaker to disappear. Similarly, these factors will effect the ability of a speaker to image beyond its outside edge. Having said this, some speakers are obviously better in this than others. The best examples that I have heard are small stand mounted two ways, point sources like the Quads and planar drivers like the Magnepans and Martin Logans.

A related issue that is also revealing of the quality of the system as a whole is where the system places noise. Much of my listening is analog. In a really good system the record noise is localized on the front of the speaker and is not a part of the soundfield. In lesser systems the noise meshes with the sound field. A related phenomena is the ability to move around in the room and have the location of instruments remain stable. For many years, I thought that this was solely an artifact of the speakers and their set-up and that it was impossible to have a sharply focused image and not have it collapse as one moved away from the ideal listening position. Now I am beginning to think that this may be an artefact of the phase accuracy of teh system as a whole. Given phase accurate speakers and electronics it is possible to have sharp image focus which is stable with movement away from the listening position. I had previously experienced this with Beveridge speakers many years ago, but not since until recently.