If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

I’m sure you are aware of Ron Bernay and his sound shed, designed and equipped for controlled listening comparisons. If the parties involved were willing to provide Ron with 2 sets of speakers, original and modified, we could get a better take on the sonic comparison. However, they would need to commit considerable time and resources, and I don’t know how high a priority this would have.

Ron and Danny are good friends and have designed speakers together, so you might say Ron has a significant bias. Plus, Ron has a long record of believing considerably more egregious nonsense than crossover part quality. 

Somewhere in these discussions, cost benefit ratio gets lost. I own a pair of KEF R3 Meta speakers that Danny reviewed (not mine to be clear). He found very little fault in them but still came up with a kit to replace the "Cheesy" crossover components. 

My response to this is that KEF is obviously trying to build a very fine speaker that many can afford. They can and do build better, The Reference series equivalent is much like the R3 but costs almost 4 times as much. I'm sure the parts complement would be far more to Danny's liking. But then there is this cost/benefit issue.

Good point about cost benefit ratio but a bit to the side of my point. It's not that the Ascend speakers had cheap parts and Danny is swapping them out; rather, it's that he's making fairly radical changes to the design which is (for reasons already mentioned and too detailed to get into) makes the speaker worse. 

Let's say Danny gives you a kit to replace "cheesy" crossover components; well, of course it would be nice to know that they would sound better from those parts. But what if the changes altered how they sounded or put the tweeter into higher distortion? That lacks sufficient respect and deference to the fine engineers at KEF that released the speaker onto the market, at whatever price point and cost/benefit that might be guiding the product's placement in their overall lineup.

Would it also be disrespectful to the fine engineers at Subaru to put a larger aftermarket turbo charger on the car? It will likely destroy the engine faster and change the performance characteristics. What if I put a lift kit and oversized tires on my truck? I know it'll torque the driveline and u joints a lot more and kill my already bad gas mileage, but I'd get better clearance in the mud and snow.

What if I salted a dish at the restaurant in plain sight of the kitchen... Awww, shock, gasp!

@hilde45, you had a point with addressing the objective performance of the first gen mod to the speakers in question. That was addressed by the gen2 mod to better appease Dave @ Ascend while still working to clean up the phase response and impedance. Now that you're debating whether it's rude to provide aftermarket mods as an insult to the "fine engineers" is watering down your initially valid argument. Stop while you're ahead.

@nlitworld you're making a good case against modding