grills or no grills on your speakers..matters?

Strongly depends on the speaker. Vienna Acoustics pays particular attention to the design of their grills for use on or off. In some case, they say the sound could benefit with them on and the enthusiast should experiment thusly. Isn't that part of the fun of this hobby?

90% of my listening is done with the grills on.

Grills muffle sound… most speakers would sound so much better with much more mufffffling…..

Lets hear it for muffffffling…..

The grill frames are often worse than the cloth itself.

In general the sound is diminished by cloth in the sonic pathway with the exception of low bass.

Q

It's kinda innerestin' that acoustically transparent grills could interfere so much. Now, I'm not saying that there's no difference...

I use a pair of Silverline Preludes with grills off, but the sound is still pretty good with them on (parties, fear of driver poking). I have a beef with much of the speaker design world in that some drivers are very fragile and can be easily dented...Magico tweeters...how happy would you be if some party goer stuck their finger in that tweeter? My Preludes have screens over the tweets so I worry less, but still...some protection for these things seems appropriate and should be designed in somehow without sonic penalties.