High Performance Audio - The End?

Visited a friend recently, who has a grand piano in her music room. Listened for about an hour, noticed what makes it sound real. Timbre at all frequencies, all notes. Percussiveness. Sustain, damping pedal effects, different sound played pianissimo to forte. Listened to her husband play a hammered dulcimer. Listened to a street jazz band without amplification, paying attention to cymbals, drum rim shots, the difference between a floor tom and a kick, etc.
Went home and equalized my Boston Acoustics A-150 speakers in my room, with thick curtains behind them, a throw rug under them, and a piece of wood under the front to lean them back, so as to more closely approximate time alignment. Very satisfying. All drivers are paper, except for the soft dome tweeter. My eq started with roughing it with a stereo 10-band equalizer, realtime analyzer, pink noise, and calibrated mic. Then, critical listening for several hours, with micro-tweaks.These speakers are stuffed full of Dacron pillow stuffing, and have automotive felt underlayment  from around all the drivers to the edge of the cabinet front, with the grille in place. I would not build speakers with this configuration, but it is what I happen to have at the moment. A Denon receiver, vintage nineties, drives them. Point is, well-recorded piano music (Sheffield lab, Mayorga) sounds pretty darn real. Startling, actually. My guitar, recorded with the same mic, sounds like my guitar, sans alteration. My wife's speaking voice, ditto. Acoustic jazz, much better than it has a right to sound.
Good enough for an entire evening of listening, with no fatigue.

deep_333,

By "By now, we know..." I meant that by now some of us have read your posts and relized that you do have very vivid imagination. We almost got worried it is sliding into illusion, delusion, and hallucination territory.

The Pioneer speakers I mentioned were, in fact, two different models. One was https://www.stereophile.com/content/pioneer-sp-bs41-lr-loudspeaker which I had not heard by the time I quoted this review to a friend of mine. He went on to buy a model up (floorstanding) with inscription A. Jones on the back, too. It was to be a guarantee of performance. My friend is not the one to change equipment often, closer to barely ever, but within a month those speakers ended up tucked behind some door never to be connected again. They are still there. Out of curiosity, I bought this speaker from Stereophile review. We thought that bigger model might have simply been inferior to standmount so it was cheap enough to compare for fun. They were donated to my mechanic’s garage, sitting high up under the ceiling. Admittedly, we did not try those speakers with tens of thousands of dollars equipment, but that is probably not what a designer would have expected when designing them. In any case, I do not doubt that Andrew Jones is a good speaker designer and I did hear two pairs of TADs (standmount and floorstander, I do not know model designation) that sounded wonderful. I believe he designed them, too but may be wrong. It is just that his venture into very low price speakers was overwhelmingly underachieving even for that price. Somewhat older and similarly priced Infinity speakers were a few galaxies above them. That Stereophile review is to a degree exactly 180 degrees away from reality 

@glupson, ah yes, the infamous "we"... the disgruntled glupson Jekyl and a glupson Hyde, the pair that keeps coming back...

 Alrighty then! Have a great time with your infinity speakers (galaxies above). My condolences on the stereophile review that fooled ya and made you flush 80 dollars down the drain! Thanks for sharing this great tidbit of information. I wish you both great luck on your future endeavors...

deep_333,

You, kind of, asked, I answered.

I paid more than $80 for those speakers and did not flush them down anything. They went high up.

I wish you best luck in picking your speakers next time. May I suggest Debrox?

Still fantasizing about my speakers' designer?

I thought this thread was about whether having a more revealing system is a bad goal. Personally I think that is the ramblings of someone desperate to sound relevant.

Take a b-grade band, genre unimportant. Playing in a great acoustic space will not make them sound worse they will sound better.

Resolution is far more likely to reveal interesting nuance. A bad system will make everything sound bad. A great system can make even some pretty awful stuff sound okay.