Paisley Research Speaker Find

[noprayer]

I had some time this fine holiday weekend and decided to go trolling for gear. One of my favorite places to go in the summer is "7 Mile Fair" which is a ginormous indoor-outdoor flea market here in Wisconsin. I picked these up for 15 clams but dont know anything about them. They are a 2 way (obviously) with 8" woofers and little bitty dome tweeters in a ported box. They sound pretty decent and somehow remind me of PSB speakers (the tweeter?) Anyone know anything about them?

 

[sealy]

Ian Paisley (the speaker designer, not the fiery Irish minister/politician) was behind the designs of Mirage, an excellent Canadian speaker manufacturer. In particular he designed the first Mirage bi-polar speaker. He had his own line of speakers as well - Paisley research. Fine speakers in their own right.

The interesting thing about Paisley is that he once designed the world's most accurate speaker (30-20000hz +/- 1/4 db). Apparently it didn't sound very good, which leads me to believe that our ears like to hear a certain amount of distortion in our reproduced music. I can only guess that this phenomenon is due to things like room acoustics, ambience, reflected sound waves, etc., that influences the way we hear, and what we like to hear.

Kind of shoots a hole in the theory that the more accurate the speaker, the better. Of course the sound engineers at JBL knew that long ago.

 

[Fast_Eddie]

Energy as well... Those are great speakers!

 

[ARJohn]

Good score ! $15 is a steal . Google Paisely , he made some great stuff .

 

[soundmotor]

What can you buy for $15?

Not many well-made 2-ways w/ lineage unless you are very lucky.

Which you were, you dog!

:thmbsp:

 

[noprayer]

My luck runs in streaks and i apparently am in one of those right now. Dodecahedrons and Paisleys in a little over a week counts as lucky i think. I've been listening to the Paisleys non-stop since i brought them home and i REALLY like them. They bumped my large advents out of the living room for now. They have a decent amount of bass for their size and a very even keeled mid and upper range. They sound like headphones filled with poop with poorly mastered source material though. So far they sound as good or better than my ADS 570/2's (which i am A/Bing right now) and like i said, the Large Advents are sidelined for awhile.

 

[hifi_nut]

Those tweeters look like Scanspeak units to me. Rather good, actually.

 

[spkrparts]

Tweeters are Vifa D 19 TD 05 08. Woofers are proprietary. Not a bad sounding line of speakers actually.

 

[Vintageman1]

The Paisley's I purchased new in the mid 80's are the best speakers I own. Although considered "bookshelf" size, they each weigh 75lbs.

 

[Vintageman1]

Energy as well... Those are great speakers!

Yours are probably identical to a model in the Energy "ESM" line. Great find, great price:thmbsp:

 

[noprayer]

Yours are probably identical to a model in the Energy "ESM" line. Great find, great price:thmbsp:

I checked the auction site and indeed these are almost exactly the same as the Energy ESM-3. The only real difference i can see is that the Energy speakers have offset tweeters making them a mirror imaged pair and mine are symmetrical . Thanks for the tip!