Good write-up James! I was, of course, with you for most of this listening and we have shared our opinions of all of these products. They were certainly among the best value sound at the show.
I might add that the HRT Stage was an interesting concept, but at least I did not find it's sound all that great. Key to your article is that you mention these as interesting, not necessarily great. The HRT needed some work, in my opinion, to optimize sound. I even wonder if a CBT approach might have been better by curving the stand and shading the level. Still wouldn't fix that spacing problem and in fact the curve would introduce gaps.
The LSA and Salk Sound's were outstanding values. They both blew me away with their impressive sound. With the LSA, when we listened, they started us out with the monitor you referenced (which I knew nothing about). Without any point of reference they sounded good, but hard to tell how good. Then a switch was made to the tower from the lower end signature line, the LSA-20 signature. I wasn't paying attention at the time to what the host was doing and didn't realize he had made this switch (I thought he was playing with the subwoofer) and was disturbed by the sudden degradation of sound. It didn't sound bad by any means, it just didn't sound as good as it had, specifically the treble range sounded less detailed and revealing of the instruments. I asked what he did and he shared it was a switch to the towers. That the towers were a lower end speaker. What! Never have I heard such a distinct difference in the resolution of a speaker between two adjacent lines. It's usually subtle at best. That Copper-Beryllium tweeter from Dan Wiggin's is something special (as is the crossover I'm sure).
So when James says interesting, my opinion is maybe leave the HRT's in the oddity department (unless you need a good computer speaker) and take a listen to those LSA's and Salk's.
James I hope we don't suddenly see a bunch of companies stacking their cheap speakers into make-shift line-arrays. We may need to then educate them of how a line-array operates.