This is very timely...

The high end market actually has more potential customers in the far east than they ever had in the west at any time. It's a status symbol in parts of Asia.

If audio writers who praise these products asked mainstream speaker designers why they don’t make super-efficient speakers, they’d learn that with efficiency comes compromises—in frequency-response linearity, dispersion, distortion, and power handling. Few highly efficient speakers achieve a respectably flat frequency response and broad dispersion. And many of the primitive tube amps that are typically used to drive them have very high output impedance, which will interact with a speaker’s impedance to change the sound in ways the speaker’s designer didn’t anticipate and likely wouldn’t condone.

This author doesn’t have idea what does he talk about. His technical knowledge is zero. High efficient speakers don’t have the thermal distortions. These distortions cause compression, significant frequency response changes on different loudness. High efficient speakers don’t need power more then a single watt.
SET amplifiers has the lowest distortion on low power (first watt). SET have the lowest distortions, no high order distortions and transistors thermal distortions.
Bottom line, a proper built highly efficient speakers with SET amplifier system sound most close to the real classical or jazz music performance.

Yeah, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard in audio. I've had people tell me the midrange is perfect and seamless- and this is with tubes.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6xMt6Wj9JE   Sure there are probably some highly efficient speakers out there that have problems. There are also some poorly built tube amps that give tubes a bad rep. But that in no way justifies any of this blanket condemnation that tries to say these things cannot sound good at all. If you want to take that approach then everything everywhere is crap so why bother at all? Just about as wrong a wrong can be. 

I want to add that extremely flat frequency response and extremely low distortions don't have correlation to the real listening. The religious belief in measurements shows the incompetence of the author.

More comedy writing.