Spent a couple of hours today researching this line of speakers and became sufficiently intrigued to place an order.
Over at the Sony-specific forum there's been a lot of talk about this X (or K) series, all very favorable of course. To make a long story short, apparently Sony a few years ago assigned the engineers in their ES division (I had a Sony ES cassette; it was quite good) the task of addressing the speaker issue in that they felt that their current speaker designs weren't doing justice to the SACD format. According to legend, the ES engineers enlisted the aid of a top British manufacturer (widely believed to be either KEF or B&W) to help them design a speaker worthy of the higher resolution audio formats. A guy from Britain who apparently had access to dealer documents posted the "white paper" describing the thinking underlying this new line of speakers. Their emphasis was on transient response, mid-range clarity, and an accurate, revealing soundstage. The engineers came up with a few things, notably what they call a "G-brace" onto which the drivers are mounted (independent of the cabinet/baffle), a new, very high resolution carbon-graphite tweeter, and the curved cabinet, amongst other things.
Reportedly, Sony was selling the low-end models at a significant loss to enter the market and was making money only on the top model. It was also reported that break-in could take as much as a couple hundred hours before their true nature was revealed, a requirement that may have hindered sales to the great unwashed.
At any rate, because Sony apparently went to great pains to create an "un-Sony" speaker, I figured I'd give them a try for $60 delivered.
Thanks for the tip re: these speakers...I'm a sucker for budget speakers which promise an audio orgasm.