[Audio Empire]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:23:55 -0700, Robert Peirce wrote
(in article ):

From experience, I am skeptical of most mini-monitors, yet I remember
the Spica speaker from years ago throwing a broad stable sound stage.
On the other extreme, large panel speakers like I have now can do the
job but they won't fit in a very small room. I am reasonably confident
others have the same goals I do and have solved, or at least made
inroads into, this problem.


Interesting comment. I have found that small monitors on good, sturdy stands
image better than most large speakers (the "infinitely small" sound-source
theory) when fed true stereophonic material (no, multi-miked, multi-track
recordings made with a forest of microphones with each instrument pan-potted
into place across the soundstage, or divided into three mono groups, right,
center, and left, don't qualify as stereo.) and I think the best imaging
speakers I ever heard were a pair of Rogers' LS3 "BBC monitors" that a friend
of mine once owned. They had no bass to speak of, but that's another story.

Big bipolar panel speakers throw a huge soundstage but they don't do image
specificity very well, in my experience. I have a pair of Martin-Logan
electrostatics now, and due to their curved surface, they act like a line
source at higher midrange and treble frequencies and they image pretty darn
well too, having some of the characteristics of the large panels (like
Maggies or Apogees) and some of the characteristics of small monitors.
They're not as good as those BBC monitors though. Of course, the imaging must
be on the recording for any speaker to reproduce it realistically. You'll not
get any imaging (especially image height and front-to-back depth) from any
rock/pop recording where the sound is totally a product of the studio, or
most jazz recordings where close-up miking and three-channel mono are the
order of the day.