Magico - Wide vs. Narrow

I owned & really enjoyed the Snell A- III’s back in the earlier 80’s & they were excellent in many ways. Amongst many other things, they used only average quality ( for the day) drivers that they carefully individually tested to ensure very close tolerances to their specs & matched them in each speaker pair. They tossed the ones that didn’t cut it. I woulnd up selling them for Proac EBS’s which was their top of the line then. The Proac’s had considerably better midrange & high end & utilized very good quality drivers ( famous ATC dome midrange still considered excellent today) & a good Scanspeak tweeter. The woofer was a 10 inch ATC & the bass was good but the Snells bested them in this area. The Proac’s imaged better & had relatively narrow cabinets that in often typical British fashion for the day, did not have the most stout cabinets. 

If I recall correctly, the Snells had an overall bigger soundstage w/ a wider sweet spot but the Proacs had better image specificity & depth. To be fare though, the room I had the Snells in before I switched to the Proac did not allow me to pull them away from the front wall sufficiently, only about 2 feet & & they probably would have liked a bit more. Also I had a Conrad Johnson Premier Four  power amp that put out a real 100 watts / side w/ 4 EL 34 power tubes / side & w/ the low sensitivity of the Snells, they probably could have used more  as I liked to play them loudly. 

i once had the opportunity to borrow a friends amazing Jadis preamp which at the time was amongst the very best available. The combo of it , the CJ & the Proacs taught what real imaging was all about w/ space & air around & in between different instruments & voices in a beautiful unified whole. Not many systems that I’ve heard since could do this as well.