directional speakers

Thanks for providing better source materials than my poor memory, @audiokinesis and @jon_5912 - It seems I was very much mistaken.  My bad.

I will say that I don't think "directional" is a bad thing, so I certainly didn't mean it as a negative, but in this case my expectations of the objective behavior of those speakers was clearly wrong.  I apologize.

ATC is not directional. They do have very small waveguides but it’s a very small mid and they are very wide dispersion. They are very much set and forget, not varying a lot by location.

My comment was based on the specs for those mids with those waveguides. I stand by that statement.

That's not to say they don't have excellent off-axis imaging. 

One brand that is not thought of as directional, but is is ATC. Those famous midranges are very much in waveguides and have limited dispersion.

Well, that’s a lot of work for BAACH. :D

It’s well known that the more reflective a room the more treatment is needed to achieve the same level of satisfaction in detail. That’s not at all new or outside of prior work in acoustics.

In a modestly treated room, the Fritz with ring radiators do pretty well, but they benefit from some treatment.

Alternatively, along the same lines of thinking, if you can put the speakers well out into the room, as well as the listening area, you achieve the same goals.

If you want directional, and you are going with Mc, the Fritz with the top end ring radiators are the way to go. They sound better than their Be counterparts and the ring radiator construction naturally produces a narrow dispersion pattern.