Well, I am in way over my head here. I like box speakers very much. I listen to ones I made myself based upon Northcreek.
Lots goes on inside a cabinet. If you tear apart an Ariel(Lynn Olson's famous speaker), for example, you see a lot done inside to deal with the consequences of placing drivers in Boxes. Pretty clear boxes are not perfect enclosures. Sean, in another post, recently talked about working on a speaker that has each driver in a separate enclosed tube to minimize internal pressure, internal standing waves and "crosstalk." Any decent speaker deals with this stuff and it's not easy.
Just look at the theory/tweaking behind transmission line speakers (Look at t-linespeakers.org. for a little info.) Some of the B&W Nautilus stuff can be understood as another step in this long experimentation. (There is a great picture of a large B&W Nautilus cabinet at that site.)
Speaking of B&W I think they do a decent job and their looks are not necessarily the strong point. I remember reading one review of the 803 where the first thing the guy said was it's not a bad speaker if you do not mind having a speaker that has a turkey baster on top of it in your living room. And the 802, well it looks like a speaker with a ham on it. These designs are not going to exactly float everybody's boat.
The Nautilas was first conceived, I believe, based upon stealth technology (I'm gettin further and further in over my head). All it does, to keep it simple, is deflect sound waves in a direction they do no harm. The enemy shoots up radar and the angles and materials of the plane do not shoot them back - you're "invisable." B & W took the idea to deflect sound waves back into the speaker enclosure where they do not interfere with the drivers. Can't do this with a simple box. Probably not the only answer, certainly not the cheapest, but I think that is the general idea. Get a good used price on the 802s or 803s and you have a pretty good speaker if you ask me.
I've heard the nOrhs and I like them. I took an entirely different view of them. They are made in Thailand as far as I know by folks who live there. If you look at the angles and stuff and then at Thai art and architecture....The first time I looked at them I thought "well, they could have packaged these to be more acceptable to the U.S. market where everybody expects a speaker to look like a box." If they were trying to tie into the "organic lifestyle" movement I'm not certain they succeeded. I concluded they were folks on the other side on the planet doing it their way.
I totally agree with you Pbb, if folks are just doing things for no reason they should be debunked (there is a lot of hype in the industry), but, with regard to speakers, I don't believe that everything that's not a box should be rejected.
By the way I've noticed a theme in your posts. You've rejected vinyl because it sounds like bacon (frying) and now speakers because they look like ham. Can we expect a retort of tubes because they look like link sausages?
Sincerely, I remain
