Good thread! I have been surprised in the past to find myself preferring the sound of speakers with more lively cabinets, or at least liking it a whole lot more than I expected I would. Audio Note comes to mind. Also I'm starting to suspect that early reflections off adjacent drivers, diffractions off cabinet edges, and other such very early reflections can sometimes have endearing effects. Technically I like the idea of a perfectly clean wave launch off the speaker with the purest possible impulse response reaching the listener's ears before the room echoes arrive. The reality of what I actually end up enjoying the most can definitely deviate from that. When we're working with 2 channels of audio playing in a room with all it's reflective surfaces it's hard to know for sure what the theoretical ideal should be. As has already been said, it comes down to taste to a large degree. "Performance" is a word I see used here in a way that refers to how well the speaker satisfies one's tastes. In that sense a speaker may perform well for one person and not for another. My co-worker recently demonstrated some DIY speakers that surprised me with some kind of magical effect, creating a sense of 3 dimensional sound generating areas that seemed to blossom up around the speakers. I didn't expect to hear anything like that since they had horn loaded tweeters with good directional control and generous round overs on the baffles, with everything mounted flush for minimal diffraction. After experimenting with them for a while he discovered that the side panels became quite resonant and sound emitting at certain frequencies, which perhaps explained this strange and strangely enjoyable sonic effect. Another recent surprise I had was experimenting with angling my horn tweeters more outboard. The idea was to illuminate same side wall reflections more and opposite side less to see what effect it had on imaging. I didn't notice anything amazing changing with the imaging, but there was a bit more air to the sound, which I suspected had to do with more illumination of the side walls. But I also noticed that the angled tweeter was probably spilling more sound into the bass horn mouth behind it, which I figured had to be a bad thing. So I put some pillows well behind the tweeter mouths in the bass cabinets, which totally killed the airiness I had added and made it sound relatively dry and boring. So it turned out the "airiness" was coming from allowing some high frequency sound to bounce into the bass horn opening, creating a bunch of very early reflections. I would have never guessed that would have any kind of positive perceptual effect. I think 2 channels coming in dry and clean in an anechoic space would not make many people happy. More channels might do it, but I don't think 2 is enough. With 2 channels, certain "special effects" are helpful to dither the otherwise serious lack of directional resolution. Cabinet liveliness can be one of those effects.