Paradigm Persona series

I’ve visited Paradigm dealers where 75% of the salespeople will candidly admit that they prefer a competitor to the Persona line at similar cost for their home systems, and no these aren’t all people who don’t appreciate clarity or who lean towards warm sounding speakers because in some cases the preferred competitor also uses beryllium.

Horses for courses. Everybody likes what they like and it’s all subjective anyway.

I love the sound of Spendor, but no doubt there are some who would say Spendors sound terrible, and I wouldn’t tell them they’re wrong or that they must have heard Spendor in a bad setup. I’d realize that they just prefer a different sound than I do.

Now if if they say any candy bar other than Mounds is best, then we’ll have to take it outside ... : )

i heard a not cheap Klipsch setup today playing on a five figure Esoteric amp at a dealer and I swear it was one of the worst sounding speakers I’d ever heard in the cost range, but there was another customer there just eating it up and I could tell that to him it was sonic perfection.

Agree with the "pick speakers first" advice. So much more variability with speakers and resulting in so much greater sound presentation differences with speakers versus anything else.

It takes a long time to do it right because you need to listen to a lot of different speakers, narrow it down to a couple, and then ideally listen to those couple on different styles of amplifier (tubes, solid state, hybrid, separates vs integrated) - not necessarily specific brands of amplification at this point (unless you have tons of time), styles is good enough to pick the speakers.

Once you pick the speakers, then dive into the amplification revisiting types and specific brands. By then hopefully you’ve got the speakers in-house, and easier to bring home a couple of amps to demo than transporting speakers (which I guess was already mentioned just agreeing).

All that said, often plays out differently in real life, especially if you don’t have unlimited resources to make all purchases at once. In my case, I got an unexpected fantastic deal on an integrated amp that was so much better than I could have expected for price range I knew I’d be in that I acquired integrated amp first. Although I did get to extensively hear a 1.5 hr demo of the amp with the eventual speakers that I’d end up getting before purchasing the amp, and even then I knew those speakers would probably be the ones (had probably heard 10 speakers by that point), though still ended up doing months of demo’ing of at least a dozen further speakers above and below in cost to cement the speaker choice.

@david_ten ,

That's cool, to each his/her own.  I wasn't trying to convince you. 

I was just saying that I think in ideal world better to get speakers first, if possible, although I didn't do it that way either for various reasons.  Maybe the next time I go through the ordeal I will try to follow my own advice, haha.

Cheers