Hi Audiocrack,
We all have different tastes in music, systems and how we listen to reproduced music and our expectations from the so called high. If you looked for a polar opposite of how I listen or prescribe a high end system, you couldn't find a better candidate than HP. MY main criteria for a system is naturalness, it's all about tone and timbre the rest will come. The servo woofers with their associated amp don't have the right tonality or timbre, and that's what you're used to, then you haven't heard natural bass, a class d amp just doesn't cut it. I can understand the compromise when there are budget issues but why should you be limited by a class d amp at this price point to begin with? Unlike HP I listen to the music as a whole, a finished canvas. He dissects music in different parts and comes up with separate story lines for each section and I've never heard that at any live performance like I've never heard such a thing as fast or subterranean bass. Double bass has a lot of tone and its fat, slow and luscious, never heard it tight, fast or subterranean. I hear bass as part of the whole and its important for me that's its fully integrated with everything else. Having an active woofer is like having part of that canvas done by one artist and the other part by another and you're trying to blend in the different styles somewhere on that canvas. No matter how good you are at blending, you still have to halves or if you want a painting and a frame. I always hear and see that. Different brands and topologies of solid state already have very different sound characteristics, tubes and ss, specially in their presentation of bass have nothing in common. I've never heard them become one. I didn't sell the systems to the Wilson owners mentioned above, I went it later fine tuning their setups and switching some components in and out. Two of the three were running tubes on the main speaker and high end ss on the subs, both changed them out for tubes. I do more setups than sales and all those years of shoehorning big speakers into small crappy spaces and really near field listening taught me a lot. I know how to make things work, I also know where the limit is with certain technologies, rooms, equipment etc. As far as the overblown scale that I heard with the Gen 1.1, I can only comment on what I heard as a whole system. It could have been the cables or electronics, I don't know. At lyric I did play around with different amplifiers and front ends and the results were always the same, and I never heard the scale problem with the 201 in any setup. All I can say is that if you're in the market for one, audition it for yourself and come to your own conclusions.
david