For what it's worth I'm a former 3.8 owner, Super Eclipse owner, VSM-SE owner, Dunlavy SCIVa owner, Tyler Ref Monitor owner, and have listened at length to the Response 2.5's and Vandersteen Model 5's. The Coincidents were musical and sweet, but lacked overall coherence (and can be problematic if your room is too small because of their tremendous bass output). The 3.8's offered a level of refinement over the Coincidents, but I felt the 2.5's were an overall better balanced speaker (and a much better buy). The Tyler's were definitely the best bang for the buck (at less than 1.2k), The Dunlavy's did everything well, but are huge and never completely satisfying musically. The Vandersteen 5's are similar - they do everything well, nothing wrong, but as hard as I've tried, they never let me get involved emotionally with the music - it's hard to explain. I don't think I had the right equipment driving the Merlin's - I may need to try them again because they did exhibit exceptional speed and imaging. But for me the Maggie 3.6 at only $4k blow them all away. How's that for objective observation?
