Change to Horns or stay Dynamic

Kana813,
Disappointed? Not really. In this hobby I know only too well that "you can have anything you want, you just can't have everything you want."
My guess at this point is that there is a 90% chance that I'll stay with the MBLs and a 10% I'll buy something else.
I'm told that there will soon be a mkII version of the 101Es with a new upper midrange driver. That just may do the trick.

Dgad,
You mentioned that you recently heard the Cessaro "Beta" horns.
Can you tell me a little about their strengths and weaknesses?
I thought that the Betas were only available in Germany and Asia. Did you hear them here in North America?
I'm told that they are great speakers but that the TAD drivers can sound a little "hi-fi-ish."

Dgad,

It's uncanny; you and I are looking for exactly the same thing at this point in the hobby. I too am extremely sensitive to distortion.

The -only- reservation I have about my MBL 101Es is that they too get congested at loud volumes during complex passages. They lose detail and smear and the soundstage becomes confused. This is true with any of the many amplifiers I have used with them, though my current amps tend to compound the problem (no amps have sounded less distorted or as wonderful under 93db, however).

I would like a speaker that, as you say, "You can listen at 100db and not even know you are listening so loud. No distortion etc. And everything remains stable in space with a transparency that is hard to believe."

I'm also looking for speakers that I can run with my 300B SET amps.
These two factors have led me to search for horn speakers using compression drivers. I ruled out the following a few years back (no offence to current owners intended):
Avantgarde
Acapella [great tweeter however]
Drivers such as Lowthers and Fostex
Back-loaded designs

The shortlist of speakers/drivers I would like to hear, in no particular order, are:

1. Sunny Cable H3W18 Majestic:
I think they use a GOTO driver in the midrange horn
2. GOTO
3. ALE
4. Cogent
5. Danley (pro-sound but interesting designs)
6. I'm open to suggestions as long as they don't involve asking me to revisit things that I have already ruled out or products that will be grossly inferior to the MBL 101Es in most other areas of sound reproduction.

Since I have no DIY talent or experience with horn or crossover design, I'm not going to buy separate drivers and horns and try to cobble something together. I'm also not going to hire someone to put something together that I haven't already heard. I, therefore, would have to hear a complete speaker system that sounds incredible in order to convince me to give up my beloved MBLs.

Kana813,

You missed, or simply ignored, the part in my post where I said "This is true with any of the many amplifiers I have used with them."
Two of them were monobocks, each worth over $30,000 a pair. One of these delivered 640 watts into 4 ohms and the other 220 watts into 4 ohms. Believe me, I've tried throwing high-quality watts at the tops (105Hz and up) of these speakers.

I only hooked the SETs up to the speakers as joke when I was between amplifiers; it turned out the joke was on me!

My 40 watt SET amps distort after 93db but MBLs get congested at loud volumes during complex passages no matter what amps you put on them and no matter how many watts you throw at them. The upper drivers simply reach their excursion limits.

The Spectron Musician III SE Mk. 2 monoblock amplifiers; the top MBL amplifiers; the CAT JL-3 Signatures; the top Boulders monoblocks, none of these is the solution because the problem isn't amplification, its the drivers.

I'm pretty sure I'll never find amps that sound better (to me) under 93dB so that's why I have the 40 watt SETs. If you heard my speakers without seeing my amps you'd swear the amps were putting out over 250 watts (not that I have to justify my decision to you or anybody else).

Dgad,
I have to ask you about the "air pressure in the room" with the Cessaros. One of the reasons I gave up on the idea of owning horns a few years ago was because I often felt a sort of pressure on my skull, which quickly let to a headache, when listening.
I know a horn lover in Italy who feels the same thing but puts up with it because the sound is so good.
Did you feel any sort of fatigue or discomfort with the Cessaros?

I went from electrostats to omni-directionals.
Your speakers look very cool.
I also like the idea of building a house around horns like they do in Japan.