And even the best audition in the world doesn't ensure long term satisfaction.
That’s certainly true, and I generally agree with the sentiment expressed in the above-quoted post. IMO, the reason personal exposure to a device is required more to see if something about the way it looks/feels/acts won’t work for you. For an example, see my review of the Teac A-H01 DAC/integrated, which is a fantastic piece of audio hardware that has some glaring usability flaws. For me, the SAM1 has a design feature entirely unrelated to sonic performance that is irrelevant in most cases but was disqualifying for me.(When I finish editing the review, you can find out what it is.) Even though they’re fantastic sounding speakers, I would’ve been unhappy had I bought the SAM1’s blind even though what was an issue for me more likely than not will not be an issue for most people.
Then again, I rarely buy a prefabricated anything that I haven’t first touched in person. I’ll order a book or SACD/DVD-A/CD/new LP from Amazon. If Edward Green, John Lobb, or JM Weston come out with a new shoe design on a last I already know to be comfortable, I might order them sight unseen. But that’s about it. Perhaps I’m old fashioned that way. Or just too damn picky.
I find it funny that sometimes people talk about 'competently designed' loudspeakers as if they know how to do it themselves.
Common courtesy is to directly address the person about whose comments you’re talking. (And yes, I do know how to do it myself for the record.)
As such, I trust the engineers B&W and KEF much more than I would trust those self proclaimed experts who frequently project themselves as know it all...
First, the only person proclaiming anyone posting here an expert is you. Some of us prefer our words to stand on their own merit, thank you very much.
Second, your trust is widely misplaced, because it rests on an assumption that is obviously, laughably untenable to anyone who thinks about it. Your implicit assumption is that the engineers are in charge at such firms.
I have no doubt that B&W employs a lot of talented engineers. As is the case with Bose’s engineers – remember: the gentleman who designed Bose’s “twiddler,” Stephen Mowry, later went on to do TC Sounds’ best subs, and currently has some affiliation with the beryllium diaphragm maker Truextent - I’m sure if B&W’s engineers were given the task of designing a speaker good enough for me (i.e. smooth design axis response and properly controlled midband directivity), they’d end up with a loudspeaker in the same class as the best efforts of Mark Dodd, David Smith, Andrew Jones, Ken Kantor, Kevin Voecks, Jormi Salvi, etc. But, like Bose’s engineers, B&W’s engineers work with direction from above. And, as at Bose, the direction from above at B&W is rather clearly to create a house sound. B&W’s house sound consists of an upper midrange out of balance with the rest of the spectrum (an
inevitable consequence of using 7” midrange with a tweeter in a little bullet on top of it).
As I see it, the material distinctions between Bose and B&W are two:
1) B&W targets a more expensive market niche (if you will, sonic furniture rather than sonic appliances), and
2) B&W have generally better styling.
But both B&W and Bose have about the same right to claim accurate reproduction.
As for KEF, I make no secret of my respect for their general direction under Mark Dodd’s technical leadership. (Mr. Dodd, it should be remembered, was also responsible for setting the modern course of Tannoy with his “Tulip” phase plug for their Dual Concentric before moving to KEF,) I also make no secret of my opinion, based on listening (some of it blind) as well as measurements taken by others as well as by me, that many of their current speakers up and down their range are best-in-class. Those include the Q100, Q900, Ref 201/2, Ref 205/2…and even the little KHT-3005SE eggs, which honestly I’d rather listen to than most so-called high end speakers. (I’ve not heard the R-Series, LS50, or Blade.) The current-generation Uni-Q is the most innovative thing audio has seen in a long time, between the radial phase plug, reimagined surround, and so on.
But that doesn’t mean that everything KEF does is automatically gold. The previous-gen iQ/xQ speakers just weren’t very good. The whole supertweeter line before that was one big bad-sounding error. (Tannoy made the same error, with the same sorry sonic results.) The Q300 (and I infer, given that they use the same Uni-Q and same mid-tweeter crossover point, the Q700) has the same midrange mushroom cloud problems that the iQ/xQ line did, for the same reason: the tweeter just isn’t stout enough to play down low enough to come in where the midwoofer has narrowed to the pattern set by its cone. And, having heard the Q300 and Q100 side-by-side, I can tell you that it’s glaringly audible to a critical listener. That is not to say that someone can’t prefer the Q300/Q700 midrange presentation, especially someone more familiar with how canned music sounds over so-called high end loudspeakers than they are with how live, unamplified music sounds. But if someone can’t hear the
difference when they’re side-by-side…that person should just pick gear by visual preference, because the sonics aren’t going to matter much.
Just one example is a member who bought Salk speakers based solely on measurements and user reviews from other forum members. He basically couldn't live with their sound. So he ended up auditioning other speakers and ended up buying KEF and selling the Salk.
Just a small correction: most Salks
don’t measure that well, by my standards at least. Yes, they are generally designed to have smooth on-axis response, but many of them have drive-unit configurations (large midwoofers, tweeters on 180deg waveguides) that are physically impossible to get consistent midrange directivity out of. The better KEFs are heads and shoulders better-measuring than the Salks, at in the measurements that very tightly correlate with my subjective preferences. As are Dr. Murphy’s Philharmonic towers, which do have consistent (very wide) off-axis performance.
