Battle of the Open Baffles

Spatial Audio speakers have impressed me greatly at shows (usually paired with LTA electronics) and were fer sure my vote for best bang per buck — can’t wait to hear feedback on the new Caladans.  Best sound I’ve ever heard was the Nola Grand Reference driven by top ARC electronics so I’m on board with the OB design concept and hope to own one of them some day.

I definitely have enjoyed most of the OB speakers that I've heard and a lot of them seem to be great values. Just all set here with my wood boxes. 😉

It would be quite hard to ship the quintets as assembled speakers.  It does not look that hard to do the assembly.  They are, to me, very much worth the effort.  I’ve heard the Quintet with the wooden horn midrange/treble module, and the Trio with the coaxial driver module and both struck me as extraordinary for the money.  I do want to hear them with the field coil Voxative module; I’ve heard the Voxativ in other speakers and it is quite a good driver-very dynamic and engaging.  However, the field coil module brings a serious bump up in price.

I have lusted after PureAudioProject Quintet15 for years, but can’t seem to pull the trigger without hearing them in person. They are very elusive and it’s hard to spend $10K+ and still need to assemble them. 

@jetter I'm a big fan of "non-box" speakers i.e. dipole, bipole (had mirage M3s forever), Omnis and open baffle (had dahlquest DQ 10 40 years ago).  Im sure there are differences (between the different kinds) but the speakers disappear, and throw a wide soundstage.  On the other hand I gather they are known for bad imaging.  Jay starts to say this but doesn't fully spell it out. 

It is rather amazing they are discounting the Maco Acoustics speakers by 40% for early adopters.  Bringing the plywood model fairly close to the price of the Caladans.

I thought reading between the lines that Jay was not as enthusiastic about the Maco as he might have been, but maybe just my imagination.

Pure Audio Project speakers should be in the battle as well—terrific sounding speakers.

Agreed, he does seem to chase the dragon concerning audio.  However, I am seeing more and more points indicating open baffle is really something to look at.  Are there any commercial speakers using LII drivers?

I just jumped into the OB world with some Tri-Art Open 5's and I'm really impressed so far with the sound I'm getting. So I'm now an OB fan. 

I'm not sure about brands based of LII audio drivers but i have heard some of Lii's stuff and they sounded good if not that refined, granted that was a while ago so things may have improved. I found the Lii 15" to be nice over all but lacking in extension and ultimate detail level. Build quality was ok but not great. 

I've also owned some speakers that Jay owned / reviewed and he thought were fantastic and they were rather basic sounding and not overly well made IMO. so his opinions are taken with a grain of salt for me, every other thing he reviews is the next best thing in audio, he's this type of reviewer IMO.