Sean, that story about the cables cracks me up. Nothing like a little accuracy upstream to show a speaker's true colors, eh? I tried for a long time to build systems around Focal drivers and just never could get them to sound "natural", a quality which I am completely unable to define scientifically but one which is present in the Dynaudio, Scanspeak, and Skaaning drivers and very little else. Maybe this is the same as your adjective "wooden".
On the subject at hand, I think that time and phase coherence are of extraordinary importance, provided of course that everything else is taken care of too. There are very few multi-driver speakers in the world that actually achieve this. Vandy/Thiel/Meadowlark are only time-coherent at a particular listening angle, and don't have spatial coherence. Dunlavys are symmetrical, which solves the spatial issue, even though they too will only be truly correct on the tweeter axis. I think that the weakest link in the Dunlavys is the cabinet: a big slab-sided box tends to sound like one, nothing you can do about it. But they do sound a lot more accurate overall than the JM Labs. It depends on your tastes and it's certainly worth making the effort to hear them both at this level.
On the subject at hand, I think that time and phase coherence are of extraordinary importance, provided of course that everything else is taken care of too. There are very few multi-driver speakers in the world that actually achieve this. Vandy/Thiel/Meadowlark are only time-coherent at a particular listening angle, and don't have spatial coherence. Dunlavys are symmetrical, which solves the spatial issue, even though they too will only be truly correct on the tweeter axis. I think that the weakest link in the Dunlavys is the cabinet: a big slab-sided box tends to sound like one, nothing you can do about it. But they do sound a lot more accurate overall than the JM Labs. It depends on your tastes and it's certainly worth making the effort to hear them both at this level.