This is awesome discussion, thank you all. Just a few responses and keep it going ;). One thing I'll say about my Quad 2912's is that I have had many audiophile listening sessions with people bringing their own gear - sometimes outpricing them by miles, and in blind(ish) listening tests, people always positively picked out the quads.
That doesn't *necessarily* mean they are better in the eyes of an engineer with a microphone and an analysis program (REW?) but somehow the result apparently is pleasing. I'd note though that my receiver has a bunch of 'fake surround' options that sometimes accidentally get turned on, and funnily enough they sound great, and if I then switch back to direct mode, it feels 'deflated'.. for a minute... and then I appreciate the non-warbly non-surroundy perfect stereo image of quads. Perhaps the same applies here. Perhaps the stereo image effects that dipoles excel at outweigh the downsides of the rear reflect?
My context is that I am building my own livingroom-and-home-cinema. Completely from scratch (newbuild house). Due to wife-acceptance-parameters I will likely have to keep my quads fairly close to the rear wall (ignoring toe-in, about a meter (3 ft)). Behind them I will put my SVS PC4000s (I have 2). Ha, I slightly worry that the soundwaves from subwoofers will hurt the mylar of the speakers.
Anyway, the weirdness for me is that if e.g. we have a single kick drum shot. Bang. If we have 10ms delay before the reflection comes through, does that then sound 'babang'? Is 'bbang' not preferable'? Either way most people seem to agree I should probably put damping material behind my speaker so I'll do that.
