Top of the morning Phil! Your point is well taken Sir! Like You I’m music first, always have always will be. Thing for me, about no in between is, I’ve had this stigma with me of always compromising my choices. Like Gene has said many times before, be it speaker or gear there is always some compromise with speaker designs. Be it a price point or where the manufacturer has cut back in order to meet a certain price point. I tend to over think, I’ll go, with my Choice of speakers and price. I researched for over three months between, Polk RTi a9’s, Martin Logan 40’s and the RBH Impression line. I have this bad Habit with my hobby of always wanting it all at the same time. So I’ll compromise mostly cause of price. I came very close to getting Polks RTi a9’s cause will they where 900.00 for the pair. Nice looking speakers Big! Bigger drivers, but they had one Glaring defect, they have a 5 dB hump around 10hz! Everyone who has them have said the samething a “Very Brite Top End!” I’m music first like you and that is something of a speaker that any good Enthusiasts would not tolerate much less audiophiles like us. Plus not knocking Polk speakers to me they have always been a good value speaker, but Polk has always been known for cutting back where Quality matters like cheating out on the XO or the drivers. If your willing to live with those compromises then I guess your OK. Well this time I said to myself, I wasn’t going to do that this time to myself by going, oh well they can’t be that bad to live with those, kind of compromise in the speaker designed just for the sake of price, and have to live with a very bite sounding speaker and go umm yeah there bite but look! I saved 1,000 bucks! Oh wow I made a great deal! So I called myself out! and went BullShit! bad speaker design is what it is a speaker that falls way short! So I finally snapped out of my shortcomings of always settling for less and said to my reasoning of choosing a very good speaker over one just because of price. I have “Gene”. and his Staff, You, “he TLS Guy” is good, very good with calling out crappie speakers no matter what others may think and “Andrew ADTG “ you guys Know good speakers and designs! I went with the Impression Elites cause of two things, what I’ve Learned from you guys and they where hands down the much better speaker design over any others I compared them to, even Martin Logan 40s. Am I happy going that route? using better commonsense and judgment with my purchase? Purchasing a speaker that’s Worth every penny this time around was the result of Not, Compromising myself because of price, much better research on my part, was cause of these things I did first. Increase my knowledge of speaker designed, Learned from you guys How to read and understand, Graphs, that Gene and his Staff posted up with their research, and said self, Don’t compromise yourself this time around. Phil for the first time for me, I made an outstanding Choice of my Main Speakers, cause I finally broke that stigma of making a bad Choice because of price or lack of Knowledge of choosing a good speaker designs. Bad habits are like character defect, once you get to the root cause of your character defect you can correct them. This time I did! With the help of some very knowledgeable and awesome friends I found on Audioholics site! Priceless in my book!!
Sorry Phil for the long winded post but I had to get that off my chest so to speak. Lol Thanks Phil! Your one cool dude in my book!!
Mike