Spendors & Harbeths [Was: Re: average listening levels]

Mr. Pinkerton makes an excellent point regarding plastic-coned designs 
and what he phrases "internal lossiness" at low listening levels. This 
raises an interesting question regarding older versus newer Spendor and 
Harbeth speakers.

My questions:  Spendor's BC1's are still considered very good speakers 
and seem to have almost a "cult" following, with a very active Yahoo 
group dedicated to them.

(1) Do many of you consider Spendor's newer SP-100 speakers to be less 
lossy or more lossy than the classic BC1's?  Are the SP-100's a 
significant step forward over the BC1?

(2) And is Harbeth's "radial" plastic composite cone an improvement over 
the poly cones of the SP-100, or just a different design approach with a 
different sounding result?

IMHO, most of the Spendors and Harbeth's I've listened to were far 
superior in low-level sound quality to many of the poly coned American 
(and some UK) speakers of this time period cited by Mr. Pinkerton, such 
as many of the Infinity and Mission brand models that touted the use of 
poly cones in their ads.

I would argue that not all poly coned speakers are the same:  As in any 
audio endeavour, some were well-designed and are still considered 
classics (BC1) while others (Infinity, for example) should never have 
seen the light of day.

Stewart Pinkerton wrote:
> On 28 Nov 2003 05:34:40 GMT, Bromo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> > Another thought occurred to me:  A good litmus test of a setup is the
> > ability to be drawn into the music at moderate volumes (~80dB or less).  I
> > think some reviewers call it "unfatiguing" and "musicality" - but whatever
> > it is called - systems like that might hold some clues to this enigma.
>
>
> That's a very good point. One of my critical tests of any speaker is
> to play it very quietly. Does the detail still sparkle? Alas, with
> many '80s and '90s  plastic-coned designs, the answer is no - there
> seems to be some kind of internal lossiness that squeezes the life out
> of the sound at low levels.
>
> This seems to be much less of a problem with modern composite and
> metal coned speakers, and IME not a problem at all with large planars
> such as Quad.