Speakers with the most detailed midrange? (non-ESL/planar)


Anyone care to give their opinion on what dynamic speaker has the most detailed/revealing midrange? Not including electrostatics or planar speakers. Approximately between the frequencies of 400Hz to 3kHz. Also, just to clarify what I mean by detail: when there is a musical passage that entails many different layers of instruments, the speakers' ability to separate all the elements so all the instruments are heard clearly and nothing is obscured. Also the ability to retrieve every last bit of information on a recording, such as random sounds in the studio, distortion in recordings and reverb tails.

As far as price goes... 2 categories... below $12,000 USD (new) and any price range. Thanks.
woofer72

Showing 4 responses by jhw9

..or if you’re looking for small and cheap, not minding limited LF, i’d recommend a pair of vintage NEAR 10m’s, which are a rare little two-way with proprietary spider-less drivers. I preferred the originals (silver woofer caps and smaller tweeters). I’ve had three pairs of these at various times in my life and they are great cheap little near-field monitors and certainly decent otherwise. Very transparent, revealing. You might have to get the woofers serviced but the original designer, Lewis Athanis, might be able to offer some assistance. He’s helping me restore a pair of the larger NEAR 50’s. The suspension ferro-fluid he uses is a special sauce and he’s got quite a creative mind regarding audio if you happen to chat with him.

This has much to do with overall speed, ability to reproduce an accurate impulse response in the lower registers (ie no out-of-phase bass ports), and aligned mf/hf phase coherence by avoiding all sorts of interpolation issues between drivers at the crossover. Some less savvy mfgr's even intentionally wired the woofers out of phase with the rest and you certainly don't want that.

These are reasons speakers designed for no to minimal crossovers or simply using single drivers are more coherent for less $, however they're also usually ported so limited at building an accurate foundation to a musical event, which I believe reduces perceived coherence (unless you only listen to clarinet recordings or sthg). Certainly pistonic driver motion is a requirement, also. Flex creates phase distortion. All of this is why truly great full-range speakers are so expensive.

So we're talking about things with highly evolved crossovers and multiple drivers (yet no port). This is it, in an expensive nutshell. All this also, unfortunately, makes the speaker larger. So we have a large, expensive nutshell.

I'd recommend Evolution Acoustics. Secondarily, Magico. Thirdly Vandersteen (Treo CT and up). Possibly also an honorable mention in the budget category.. the Elac Adante (tower). I've spoken with Andrew Jones and he seems to know what he's doing.

If you're budget constrained beyond that, but have the space then i'd recommend finding some well-cared-for second-hand Dunlavy's. Freight may cost as much as the speakers, hwvr.


I mentioned the NEAR 10m’s. To clarify, if hunting down a pair, the later versions (all black woofers and 1.1in inverted dome Ti tweeter) were ok, but to my ears, the earlier models with raw alu woofer dustcaps and smaller Ti tweeters sound more revealing (for whatever reasons i don’t know). I preferred these for small setups, however. They’re reminiscent of electrostatic headphones in the nearfield. Also, If NEAR ff suspension stiffens (from age or being over-driven by a high powered amp) that would definitely veil their sound. NEAR drivers are robust and last a long time if cared for (no rotting surrounds, etc.. just service the unique ferrofluid). Lewis still services the drivers (if he has the time, that is, he still seems a busy audio engineer).