Difference between today and yesterday.

Mrtennis, we seem to share this preference for planar speakers, especially for stators and I would add the Quad 63 and the good old Beveridges to your list. I've owned most of the gear you've mentioned and to this day I (at least imagine to) hear the colorations of cones, which a good planar speaker, inspite of other drawbacks simply doesn't seem to have. I've held onto my Quads 63s with Gradient subs practically until now and in the years following their first appearance never really found something better, except for stacked 57s perhaps, but now having changed house, I've finally settled for the big Sound-Labs. I've listened to a lot of (cone) speakers of current production and although I found many of them impressive in certain aspects of reproduced music, I could not agree more with your final statement. Those speakers you refer to, held the secret of "musicality", a highly subjective term of course, but sometimes, if driven right, they came uncannily close to the real thing, whereas many modern designs fail to impress me in this respect. Perhaps there are less and less concert goers amongst the designers and within the buying public. I wouldn't know.

LOL: Well spoken Eldartford!
Especially those ss powered ones. Much better highs.......

Well Rodman, I do and that is why I stuck with my Quad 57 and later the 63s for such a long time and when I was younger and wilder, to get a bit more SPL I stacked and even quadrupled the 63s and combined them with Maggie Bass panels. It was a weird setup but it worked quite nicely. I almost liked the a-Capella horn speakers, but I could not get the livelyless, the P.R A.T. I was used to, so I only took the plasma-tweeters and integrated them with the 63s, suddenly getting much more tranparency. I've now settled with the big Sound-Labs after a life time of Quads. I am happy, but I've decided to keep the plasma tweeters. so I've gone from conservative old to new, but it took me practically half a lifetime, not counting my being unfaithful to the stacked 57s.

Well Rodman, I did exactly as you suggest, I don't know how many times and any comparison done made me, often reluctantly, knowing of their drawbacks, go back to my good old Quads. This had nothing to do with nostalgia, rather with intimate acquaintance of live music and comparisons made not unlike those MrTennis talks about. Electronics and wires on the other hand are a different story. Here I have gone with the times and enjoyed the improvements, regarding reliability as well as the sound of more modern designs. However even here again, I hod to tube roll quite a bit with tubes from the 50 and the 60s to really get the best performance out of the gear.

MrTennis-We did exactly what you propose many years ago: We recorded a flautist, a lute player a soprano and even a string quartet in one of our friends music room, recorded it on tape with a big professional Revox in stereo of course and then played it back through various rigs. I don't recall all the speakers, preamps and amps we compared the music with. It is too long ago. I remember Lowthers, the famous small BBC-Monitor, forgot what it was called and several others. There was GAS gear, Soundcraftsmen, original US Marantz, ML the man and a lot of European stuff. I only remember the gear, that came out in top to all our ears, because it was my rig:
Beveridge preamp, 2 Audio Research D-79s and stacked Quads, which I exchanged much later for quadrupled 63s, Sequerra ribbon speakers and Maggi bass panels.

Rodmann, I wholeheartedly agree with you. You can train your ears to become intimately familiar with the sound of live music - and singers voices for that matter. The capacity of our aural memory is stunning, were it not so, you would not be able to identify familiar voices over the telephone within a split second....and that is only the beginning. If you are sort of steeped in live music of what ever kind, you will within the space of listening to the first bar of a piece know at once if a system sounds right or not and after a few seconds be able to pinpoint quite accurately what is wrong. There are quite a number of afficionados amongst us, who taking live music as a reference, will be able to judge the sound of a system or of a single component under their scrutiny with a fairly high grade of objectivity. ( Not objectivity in the sense the natural sciences demand from us of course, but which the old Gestaltpsychology would probably be fairly happy with.)

Quite apart from that, I don't know if I'm right, but I have the faint suspicion that with the ongoing decline of sales of recorded classical music and the painfully slow progress of the digital medium both in soft- as well as hardware to render a truly satisfying experience of a big classical symphony, modern speakers are built to best render that kind of music, where digital excels in and likewise most CDs are sold or rather songs of that genre are downloaded. That would explain, why so many lovers of classical music seem to stick to analog and in the search of a "perfect" speaker often go back to the "old", hardly out of nostalgia, as has been proposed, but rather, simply put, because to many concert goers of classical music most modern non planar speakers, even those with the big names, simply don't sound "right".

MrT, forgive me, but we know that and you've repeatedly told the same thing ad ( my personal ) nauseam. The natural sciences, contrary to what many people think, do not reign supreme in all fields of human experience. Empiricism can be a valid source of knowledge, if you approach it carefully, especially in the Humanities.