B&W 804, JM Lab 918, Thiel 2.4, or Helicon 400?

How important is hearing the signal fed to your speakers by your amp? How important is hearing the correct harmonic content of timbre? If these things are important to you, then there is no question about it if musical accuracy is what you seek.

Thiel.

But another choice could also be Vandersteen.

Cheers, Steve

Thanks Steve.

Yeap, I hear this about Thiels. I need to go listen to them. I also looked into Vandersteens, but decided to take them out of my list because they won't get through the 'wife test'.

Thanks for the input.

Horacio

With those Rotels, I would suggest the Dali would be a great match. The Dalis are sensual and rich. The Thiels may well sound dry with Rotel IMO. The JM Lab are also very phase coherent and have already gotten very good press in Europe. I auditined the S8e a couple times and it is excellent but not a speaker for rocking out - it's more acoustic-music oriented but for you that may be perfect.

Glad to see you pick appropriately sized speakers for your room. That is an important detail that many people overlook and then they mess around with room treatments and amplifiers to try to achieve good tonal balance, without ever really getting there. All the speakers you have on your list will be excellent - they'll just have different flavors of sound. Experimentation is what you need now. Good luck! Arthur

I had the wife test thing going with the Vandersteens too when I showed her pictures of them on their website. But then I got her to hear them in the store and she said, wow.

I'm lucky, she chose sonics over looks and now thinks they look great too!

Get her to hear them!

Thiel Cs 2.4
JM Labs/Focal 928 diamond