Ever discover cheapo speakers actually sound...

$240 list price speakers - $30K of gear to feed them and it sounds "decent" compared to your regular main expensive speakers.

IMHO, this is highlighting that you might have a problem somewhere or elsewhere. This type comparison should really be "Night and Day". A speaker is the most influential part of a system provided it is fed properly and placed properly in an acoustically treated room. I note that you have become enamored with MBL (at demos) and yet you have the outstanding Merlin speakers at home....to me all these factors just do not quite add up correctly. Could it be room acoustics or something else?

I don't mean to be critical but I really do believe you should get "night and day" between $240 and $10 K speakers. I would understand if you were comparing $2000 list price speakers against an oddball $10K speaker but you have excellent main speakers! Again I would be concerned and please don;t take this as criticism - my thinking is that if you can identify the issue then you could be much happier. For example is it possible you have a lot of gear and shelving cluttering and crowding the speakers or your listening position? Might one item in the chain be faulty?

When I first turned on the inexpensive jbl's, they sounded horrible, but after some time improved tremendously?

I missed this post....clearly you do have a problem somewhere - it us likely intermittent from what you report. Speakers do not sound horrible and then sound good.

Almarg,

There is another explanation that works too - if the coloration and distortion from the $240 speakers is subjectively preferred to the much better $10K speakers then you have it. After all, hyper compressed rock/pop music may sound more pleasant on a boombox or a car audio system than a revealing system - especially if all that the $10K speakers do is to better reveal distortion on the recording (mechanical distortion from bad speakers is often better to hear than precisely represented electronic distortion from clipped waveforms on a hyper compressed CD - think Metallica!)