Open Baffle Experience

Best sound I’ve ever heard, bar none, was the Nola Concert Grand four-tower speakers powered by top ARC electronics and a front end I can’t remember at a NYC audio show. This told me two things — an open-baffle, dynamic driver design is extremely intriguing, and a line array is just superior at conveying the scale and effortless sheer dynamics of a live performance.  Genesis and Pipedreams line arrays impacted me similarly, and I’m forever wrecked until I have a room and budget that can get me there.  Ugh. 

i tried a set of clayton’s m3 sapphires, i felt the open baffle design is a real winner, providing great sense of space and realism in the bass - very very impressive in that regard

as much as i wanted to love them, keep them, i could not get accustomed to their rather forward treble (despite much much effort expended to ameliorate) and relatively recessed midrange, but those issues are ones of tonal balance, related to driver selection/mating, and not related to the wonderful open baffle nature of the design

i think many other users have had really great results using good tube amps with spatials (which i did not want to do in this case for my own reasons)

Kenjit burped: "Do not listen to folks who claim open baffles are better than box speakers. They probably cant afford state of the art box speakers which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Don’t forget rule #1, never listen to kenjit for anything.

I have heard many, many speakers in my lifetime and the S2 open baffle speakers below are among the top.

BTW, I recently heard Spatial Audio speakers for the first time with Linear Tube Audio electronics at the NYC show and thought they were one of the top 3 I heard at the show.  Very impressed. 

I have the Linkwitz Orion 3.3, the Emerald Physics CS2.3, and the Magnestand maggie 1.6 - all dipole open baffle speakers.

The Orions and Emerald Physics - sound a lot like Maggies on steroids - they have the open sound stage of Maggies, but with better bass and dynamics.  The Magnestand Maggies improve the bass and dynamics of the typical Maggies and are more efficient.  They all sound superb in most respects.  I think I prefer the Orions, but its close.