This view I think makes sense for your reproduction philosophy which, if I understand you correctly, focuses on coherence and not on height and scale. But I disagree. My ears don't hear it working this way in real life -- comparing what I hear in live music to what I hear from different stereo loudspeaker systems.
I don't hear a full classical symphony orchestra playing Pictures at an Exhibition coming out of a Zu Definition IV as convincingly as I hear it coming out of a YG XV or a Rockport Arrakis. I would like to hear the upcoming Zu Dominance.
I believe strongly that musical genre preference substantially drives loudspeaker preference. If we narrow the musical genre preference to jazz I actually think that a lot of individual subjective preferences would coalesce around a plurality view that horns/SET is the most convincing way to reproduce jazz music.
I personally believe that there is something about the way horn loudspeakers reproduce the sounds of brass instruments which is consonant with the way brass instruments themselves produce their sounds. If people who have experience listening to a lot of different types of loudspeakers hear jazz reproduced by horns/SET I think there would be statistically significant agreement.
If someone’s musical genre preference were mainly rock, or if someone’s musical genre preferences were equally divided among the main genres of music, I would not select for that person a horn/SET system.
For rock and thunderous symphonic classical music I like to have a lot of cone driver surface to move air. I think a large-sized or maybe a medium-sized dynamic driver system is a general purpose or all purpose loudspeaker system.
Conversely a large, four column dynamic driver system might not reproduce small-scale music -- solo vocalists with acoustic accompaniment or solo instrument musicians or small ensembles -- as convincingly as a smaller loudspeaker system might.
I think electrostatic and ribbon drivers reproduce particularly convincingly the sound of the human voice. Consequently I personally like best electrostatic and ribbon driver planar speakers. (I also like their "open" sound.)
Well, I do not know where you heard "Pictures at" on Zu Def4. It wasn't at my house. Next time you're over, let's play that. But more to the point, nothing is perfect and if one speaker plays something more convincingly to you than another but both are relatively convincing, then that's fine with me. For me, when I hear YG on symphony, that (IMO-poorly-chosen woof-mid) crossover point imposes a choke point in dynamics and resolution that kills the illusion. And if it takes 2000 watts to overcome that, I'm not in for it. To me the YG gets progressively less credible as music complexity under crescendo builds. Not that it's bad in the total speakers population sense, but it's not as good as it should be for its economics, in that respect. It is not a speaker that scales under reasonable amplification, in my view.
But let's be truly honest. No collection of hifi components arranged into a system can absolutely reproduce the real, corresponding event. We at best get to listen to a successful aural illusion. "High Fidelity" is an admission that it is not complete fidelity. It just tries to get close, and closer. So a speaker that can be convincing on all music without being completely real in any one, is preferable to a single-expertise speaker. I just know that if one were building a single-expertise full-symphonic speaker, it would look a lot more like a Zu Definition, physically and electrically, than like a YG. In the current distorted economics of our interest here, the YG isn't expensive enough or intensive enough in all-out execution to be absolutely state-of-the art (except maybe in dynamic drivers' frequency linearity, which is just one thing), but it's also not affordable enough to use market compromise as an excuse for its musical liabilities. Talking about whether a YG Hailey or a Zu Def4 is more convincing on orchestral music is a picayune worthless exercise. Most speakers can't do as well as either, and the things that make you prefer YG over Zu are generally unrelated to the things that make me prefer Zu over YG.
I think you misstate what you refer to as my reproduction philosophy. I value coherence over most other things. You could say I am a coherence-first system assembler. But not at the total expense of everything else. A Zu Definition is going to intentionally limit height because it is designed to limit floor and ceiling effects which are a much bigger problem in most domiciles than whether they can make Johnny Cash 8 feet tall. You can hear this plainly listening to same material on single-FRD Druids, which do not limit floor and ceiling effects, and Definitions, which do. On the other hand, the Definitions have much better scale in width than their single driver brothers, and I definitely find scale in width vastly more important to convincing symphonic reproduction than height, which is going to be limited by most rooms anyway. Keith's room and my main room are similar in size and both are part of open plan houses. I don't hear YGs play anything familiar any "taller" than my Def4s.
Of a few major spokes of concern among audiophiles my critical evaluations start with coherence, then authentic tone, dynamic scale, minimally-authentic bandwidth, spatial scale in that order. I don't obsess too much over depth because you always get some and most of it in recorded music is artificial and exaggerated. What audiophiles chase in perceived depth is just not equally present in live music.
I'm musically omnivorous. I've had electrostats, point-source monitors, dynamic columnar, crossover-intensive, simple 2-way, FRD-based crossoverless, non-ESL planar speakers. And while I have chosen not to own any horns, I've listened to plenty. As Sean Casey says, "horns are for theaters, and maybe very big houses..." You can't get far enough away from them to cohere. In all those speaker types I've owned and lived with, none ever affected what a play in music. Quad ESL had to play Pink Floyd, Traffic, Led Zep and The Band; LS3/5a had to play 1812 Overture. The hifi exists to serve the music; the music isn't subordinate to the hifi.
Phil
