dunno, i've never heard a PSB speaker. Sometimes i think i couldn't live with more revealing speakers than i already have. I was watching some old dvds of Marmalade Boy last week and the hiss in the original Japanese soundtrack was so audible it bothered me. I can only imagine it on some Revel Salons. Which reminds me, rmk switched from $12k revel studios to $3k JTR Triple 12s?
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Presumably, if the frequency response is the same, a more "revealing" speaker will be one that simply adds less distortion to the signal. So you would not hear the hiss any more than you now do, but would hear it more clearly, just as you would hear everything else in the recording more clearly.
(You would hear more of it if the speakers boosted the relevant frequencies relative to the rest of the sound, but otherwise you would hear the same amount of it, just with varying degrees of clarity. Of course, different speakers do not tend to have precisely the same frequency response, and so some will play some portions of the sound louder than others, relative to the other frequencies. But that has nothing to do with which speaker distorts more than the other one.)
I have heard people say that more revealing speakers make bad recordings sound worse than they do on other speakers, but I don't agree with that assessment. I think what they do is make good recordings sound better, so that the difference between good and bad recordings is more pronounced.
By the way, these are what I use in my main 2 channel system:
http://www.apogeespeakers.com/stage.htm
I listen to all sorts of things on them, including old Caruso recordings. One hears the defects with crystal clarity, but the defects are there with added distortion when one listens with speakers that distort more. With bad recordings, I don't think it matters as much what speakers one has, and if I only listened to old Caruso recordings, I would not bother with speakers that are as expensive and troublesome as the ones I use. But with good recordings, they make a big difference, and this applies to recordings as old as the 1950's, with some of the jazz and classical recordings I have. But even with bad recordings, such as the very old Caruso recordings, his voice does sound more realistic with better speakers than with lesser ones, but just not enough of a difference to be worth much to me.
As for how my speakers compare with the others mentioned in this thread, I have not heard them, so I am not in a position to say much of anything about that.
As for the issue of how much of a difference is worth a particular amount of money, it is going to depend on several things, not least of which is how much money one has. If one has the wealth of Bill Gates, an extra $100k for a tiny difference in sound may be worthwhile, but if one has a normal income, it would not matter if the difference were great, as that would be too much for most people to spend.
