Reminds me of Peter Aczel of The Audio Critic raving about the Linkwitz Orion speakers and how they sound truer and more lifelike than any "monkey coffin box speaker".
His endorsement for the Orion sure worked because I bought a pair.
I've heard some big Magnepan and Martin Logan speakers at dealers a few times.
Different strokes for different folks.
The Maggies are actually quite different, as they are two-way systems, and for highs they are a line-source, and they sound different than electrostatics, and IMO not as good, though they do give people a taste of a panel speaker experience at a much lower price. I think the problem Maggies have now is that their SQ advantage over reasonably-priced box speakers has lessened over time, and now they're even more of a niche product than ever.
The Orions are a very interesting "dream system" case, and as you may remember one I considered carefully years ago. I did like the Orions, but nowhere near as much as Aczel did, and once I heard the Salon2s the case was closed. The Salon2s struck me as far better, and were one of my two or three OMG experiences I've had in audio over decades. (As I remember, you had a similar experience the first time you heard the Salon2s too.)
The more I looked into them the more the Orions struck me as a case of the designer, SL, being obsessed with figuring out an implementation of certain speaker design principles that he was fascinated by, and then being forced down a path of solving or mitigating one unique engineering problem after another to realize his dream. Tweak after tweak after tweak. His website is honest and fascinating in this regard. I have read the entire site more than once. And in the end he abandoned the Orion and moved on to the LX521, which he now claims to be a better end of the road, and as good as it gets. (I'll say this for the LX521, it sure is ugly, so it had better sound awesome.
)
I think Roger West of Sound Lab is much the same way, though his problem was even more grandiose. At least SL gets to use conventional drivers. And of course, a price of $35K or so limits your market to rich people with an audio obsession. There are some, ahem, but not very many. And the Sound Labs don't like loud stuff and deep bass very much, so they're not a good dream for many types of music. But for acoustic jazz and classical music, well, there's magic there. Real, change-your-perspective magic.
