Thunderchief, speakers are just like optics and computer guidance systems on a jet fighter or bomber. The ability for the jet to function well pivot entirely off these two platforms. Given that pilots are superb across the board, if everything else is up to snuff, but not the guidance/optics, you can forget about a good run. I saw the same thing serving on a sub...if the final filter in a chain is not tightly calibrated, then everything falls apart.
The same thing holds true with AR3s and AR3As, which i merely abbreviated out of convenience to AR3s. Their resolution is rather poor in this day and age, a quality noted in vigorous fashion by our beloved Zilch, and also by Peter B.(
http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/IP.Board/index.php?showtopic=5322&page=1 ) when he did a workup and prep for his Stereophile review of them a few years back. If you want me to be positive about my remarks, I would say it is positively unfair to subject people to a listening test when you use a speaker that muddies the waters and has a pronounced rolloff, both of which the AR3 and AR3A exhibit. They also have pronounced cabinet issues and crossover/attenuator issues, and their fan club will then savage you when they bring out chants of unfairness because of the age and declination of their drivers. Zilch was fond of pointing out AR never widely published frequency response charts of their speaker in operation, only the individual drivers. Hmmm, what's up with that. He thought it was obvious.
I don't wish to go down that rabbit hole, as Zilch did, because he ended up getting banned from the classic human speaker site for presenting in vigorous scientific fashion what was going on with the AR3/3A speakers. He was stoned figuratively and summarily escorted off the site for publishing the measured truth. Please don't start doing the same here - they are fun speakers and do great for many people - but they do not do critical listening tests in any adequate scientific fashion, because they are limited.
Feel free to read all of this thread, and you will glean the speakers used. I'm not trying to sell or push anything we have listened to; they all were merely part of the process. I also have not hidden anything - the events were totally open to anyone on AK who chose to attend and RSVPed. The local and regional people that came all heard what went down, on music they wanted to hear, and I don't think anyone left grinding an axe like we see from a number of folks(at times) here. Maybe the axes would be present if we set out to declare winners and losers, but we never sought to go there.
There are any number of well thought out and partly/fully realized speaker systems that can do most/all of the attributes I cited in Post #122. Multiple people have posted about the speakers in play for our listening sessions that spawned this thread, and they do suffice/excel for meeting these attributes. The purpose of this thread is not to generate speaker recommendations, establish the veracity of blind or double blind testing, or the superiority of any one amp or type of amp(s) or topology - it is to establish whether the average listener can readily distinguish differences when we can change out one component in a system of high enough quality. Since amps are the favorite battleground, that was the first(and primary) cohort we tested. The answer was a resounding YES!, there are differences.
We have gone further, and conducted like testing among preamps, cd players, and turntables to a small extent, and have proved to our own satisfaction that there are differences in all the signal chain components, ONCE THE CHAIN IS OF SUFFICIENT QUALITY.
We are not a stereo store, nor do we have unlimited funds to buy and demo all kinds of exotics. We also don't have a 5,000 sqft house, so we deal with a large but modest group of gear that has had their days as A or B rated status with the audio rags, set up in a plastered midcentury house. This allows us to represent what we hear as similar to many of the AKers here - a modest, space limited dwelling is still capable of supporting a very good to near excellent audio listening environment with known limitations. If we hear differences here, you can as well.