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No, it shouldn't

No, it shouldn't - if the most magical speaker one has ever heard is currently available, and he can afford it, and has an appropriate room for it - then there's no reason he shouldn't own it, and be done with the speaker chase.

RGA - I've heard the AN-E's (those big $20k ones) at soundhounds a couple of times, with that bigass turntable and all AN tube amplification, and it doesn't hold a candle to my quads - at least not in their room. The soundstage is barely beyond the outer limits of the speakers and no real depth, the sound simply doesn't detach from the speaker area at all and sounds nowhere near as eerily real as my quads, nor do they present one single coherent large picture of the performance, but rather a lot of bits and pieces. Furthermore their tonality is nowhere near what my quads can do whether I use my KT66 tube amps with them or not. They were certainly better than most boxes and had attributes approaching the quads, but I haven't heard them achieve it at soundhounds by any means.

This is not to call down the AN's, when a box speaker does what an electrostat does our world will cease to exist as we know it because the laws of physics will be out the window! I'm sure there are some electrostats it's preferable to, but not the 57's.

I'm still looking forward to having you over, but am still unable to find a digital source worth spit - I've bought and sold the Cyrus CD6, Musical Fidelity Small X series dac/tube buffer/power supply, and the Rega Planet 2000 - they were all equally capable messengers and quite good in some areas, but the overall musical experience was still greatly lacking. When I was in my 26x40 room with 20 tubes in my system, digital was "tolerable", even good sometimes - in my current room, it's not, and it seems that digital is going to have to get more than orders of magnitude better - it has to be a whole different animal to please me. I doubt that even the AN non-os dacs will do it - after all they still have to abide by the same bits on the disk. And they're very expensive compared to the slew of other non-os dacs out there.

I am however on the wait list for Mark Levinson's new Burwen Bobcat system, this is my last attempt at digital - it doesn't abide by the bits - it alters the sound on the fly to remove digital artifacts. I'm not after scientific replication of the bits on the disk, I'm after music. Until I get that, all you could listen to if you came over is my beloved tuner (albeit with 15 pretty good presets remote controllable) - but still with a pretty poor antenna, lots of noise despite great analog sound. If the Bobcat works out, you'll have to come by next time you're in Victoria, but it's many weeks away yet if that soon. In the meantime, I'm much happier without digital than I was with it, at least in my current residence.

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