JM LAB any good?

Both the JM Lab & the Cubs are equally excellant speakers. The choice of either is really dependant on the rest of your system & your musical prefereces. You can't go wrong with either one in a well balanced system. The JM Lab has the edge in the highs, smoother, more musical & slightly more detail and air. The Wilson's have the edge when it comes to weight and slam of a big orchestra. These differences come into play only once your whole system is in synergy with one of these speakers. The Sonus Faber is beautiful but colored in character & cannot fully get away from the sound of it's cabinet. It would be helpful if you post the rest of your intended system, including cables, for further comments on final character of your system with any of the above speakers.

The Utopias blow away the Cubs!!!

I don't like the Focal tweeters that both Wilson and JM-Lab use, they ring at 16 kHz. This is the same frequency that TV sets scan at, and many recordings have this noise leaked into the recording. THESE TWEETERS ARE FLAWED. Get a speaker with a Scanspeak Revelator sot dome tweeter, like the Montana line, Nova, Meadowlark, etc. Barring that, any with the Dynaudio Esotar tweeter. THESE TWEETERS HAVE AN ELECTROSTATIC QUALITY THAT A METAL DOME WILL NEVER HAVE!!

Carl I was taking you seriously until you said that you liked Montana speakers better than the JM Lab Utopia line 8-). I agree that Wilson speakers have some problems in the treble (they sound like shreaking banshees to me). Are you sure that the 16KHz problem exists in the Utopia tweeter? - it is not a commercially available tweeter, so it can't be the same one used by Wilson. Also, be careful what version of the Revelator you get, there was a problem that was found by Mr. Linkwitz (Linkwitz crossover, Audio Artistry, etc.) that was fixed in later versions of the tweeter. Eric

Don't leave out the Merlin TSM SE's. Fabulous detail and musicality

Voce Divina q.Millenio Soprano

i like both the scan-speak & dynaudio tweeters. that said, i *also* like the focal inverted-dome titanium tweeters in my current meret re speakers. no ringing here... doug