audiojan,
Yes I hear you on that. I heard the Virgo 2s in quite a few rooms, with various gear, including mine in which I could have lots of space to play with. I tried with tube amps, and powerful Bryston amps. Never truly got rid of the wooliness. Fremer also said that of that speaker at some point as well.
Loved the upper mids. As I remember the Virgo 2s had a metal dome tweeter. I think it added a very attractive bit of "shine/shimmer" to the upper frequencies which, married with the warm tone of the mids, made for a very seductive sound. AP moved to soft dome after that I believe.
Changed the sound a bit, but the designs also got more coherent sounding. The Audio Physic Libra I had were sort of the next step for the Virgo in a way - more coherent, punchier better defined bass, soft dome tweeter. Very, very "organic and woody" sounding, in a good way.
The side firing woofers were supposed to make bass more even, but actually I think I found AP speakers could be a bit more challenging to set up because of them. But when set up right, I love the AP speakers bass particularly for classical music. There is a sort of "spread" of bass that seems to spread out around the room, especially for a swelling symphonic passage, that really reminded me of the real thing.
The Audio Physic Scorpios I had were a post-Joachim Gerhard design, though still maintained a lot of the AP sound. They disappeared insanely well, were the most controlled, dense and punchy top to bottom of any AP speaker I've had, but they just lacked that last bit of magic tone from the Joachim Gerhard era, so I sold them and moved on.
I remember being pretty stunned by the original Avanti design, especially the Avanti Century. But they used different drivers (metal) and went to soft dome tweeters and...I think maybe paper for the midrange. The Avantis and Virgos after that had a really nice warm, airy sound, a bit softer than previous models actually, a bit more polite.
The latest Avanti model sounds more neutral, does the disappearing/detail stuff really well and is one of my favorite looking speakers on the market. Just incredibly beautiful cabinetry with the glass coating. Didn't *quite* have the AP warmth that originally attracted me to the brand.
Anyway, it is interesting to me that you moved from Thiel to Audio Physic, as Audio Physic is one of the few brands I could imagine moving on from Thiel to.
