Hey grannyring,
Of course it always boils down to personal taste, like all artistic pursuits there is no right or wrong, it's what the individual finds pleasing to his sense of taste. So you are stating the obvious in most of your post.
However, even in the very beginning of my life long pursuit at putting together my systems that would sound like the illusion of real music two constants have always been in effect:
1) If timbres/tonality were not correct to my ear's the rest did not matter to me.
2) I always knew that if some new piece of gear sounded that much better then my reference, watch out, new is not always better, maybe different, and you better live with it for awhile to see if it's as charming as you thought it might be.
As I stated earlier in this thread I have never liked horn and single driver designs. Therefore, before Eric's breakthrough you could not really use SET amps on full range multi-driver box speakers. Now you can! So, for my personal taste I can have the colors/tonality of a SET design with no apparent drawbacks as far as I can tell.
By the way: Spent another six hours in front of the Ulf's today. If they are not totally broken-in yet it got to be close now. They are magnificent music makers. They have the overall house sound of the DI's taken to even a higher level across the sonic board. When I write my review for hometheaterreview.com, hopefully in the next 4 to 6 weeks, I'll get into all the little details of Ulf's musical magic.
