geolemon wrote:My old favorites "wish I owned a pair" were one of Martin Logan's most entry level model... a smaller floorstanding set, the Martin Logan "Clarity" model.
Of course, I'm never sitting still when I'm at home - I hardly have "dedicated listening sessions" where I plant my butt in some sweet spot- that's one huge reason I'm a fan of these - the dipole effect of that panel really sounds natural.
(my 32 NSB's I picked up are going into a line-array dipole)
And at $1700, they were acheivable, not too horrible.
But after this year's CES, I've found something that makes the ML stuff sound like Bose (and this, in a world where big price jumps usually account for subtleties in quality).
Check these out, if you want to be absolutely blown away by a speaker:
http://www.bolzanovilletri.com
Unbelievable. My favorites are now a $4,000 set, that quite literally blew everything out of the water at CES - even sets like TAD's behemoth flagship with the Beryllium coincident-source drivers, McIntosh's $85,000 line array towers, Focal's $80,000 Grand Utopia cabinets, and even MBL's $90,000 Radialstrahlers (which would be the closest to accomplishing the same sort of spacial illusionary trickery).
If you want to be blown away by realism and dimensionality, that's the one.
The head engineer was demoing a simple stereo pair, in a small side room off their main room (Alexia Park complex).
Unlike most of the other exhibitors, I noticed a lack of exotic wall treatments - in fact none at all.
Unlike most of the other exhibitors, there was also a lack of uber-high-end exotic cabling, $20,000 pairs of monoblock tube amps, or other outragious gear - just a CD player leading to a 50x2 solid state amp.
(I heard the Torre, part of their Campanile series, if you click their website - the smaller of the two floorstanders in the set)
It's not hard to picture how the speaker works - it truly sets up a 360 degree radiating pattern - just like how sound naturally occurs, like a musician plucking a string, or a stick hitting a drum.
Never before have I been in a situation where my ears made me suspect my eyes were what was lying to me... it seriously was that dimensional, and realistic.
What's amazing is that the best sounding systems are ALWAYS the ones that follow the K.I.S.S. principle. I'm not big on all the enormous line arrays and such. Thanks for the find, I may try and demo these if there's a dealer anywhere around here. Those things look gorgeous.
I can see the DIYers looking for white papers now...
). 
