A very good issue. Wes reports on a super-speaker and Art reviews a good DAC. The (Klipsch) speakers in particular got me...because they seemed so darn close to the $100k YG's. It sounds as if the Klipsch's were *better* on vocals !! And it was equally shocking to see Wes state that the YG's were *not* more musically involving, at five times the price. The Klipsch's are just the latest horn (this decade) to show what they're capable of.
Then, Kalman's review of Floyd Toole's book. Toole was instrumental in pioneering loudspeaker measurements. But loudspeakers still have a long way to go. Designers have failed to overcome the (still) very-high distortion in their systems. And power response/radiation is pretty bad as well. Siegfried Linkwitz has been saying this for years.
I mean, if designers were aware of just two things:
1. The virtues of compression-driver horns
2. The time-of-arrival difference between (live) hall reflections and ones generated from box speakers at home.....
....they would change what they're doing. But they haven't.....