Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

My guess would be they produce better loudspeakers because they had much better LP's for many years.

It looks like Wharfedale has tackled some of the stickiest problems in loudspeaker design.  The frequency domain summing is excellent, especially the vertical pattern - although I would like to see more angles shown and less averaging.  The horizontal pattern is tilted down but is remarkably free of dicontinuities that plague typical 2 and 3 way divisions due to optimized transitions in driver diameter to wavelength ratio.  

The 4 way system also reduces spectral contamination from Doppler distortion and the Faraday rings speak to low harmonic and intermodulation distortion.  The aperiodic design is apparent from the shown curves, but the degree of benefit is more apparent in group delay or sine burst response graphs.  True aperiodicity is achieved by a backwave absorber like the Nautilus, but takes a lot more space for this size of woofer than the acoustic resistance damping.  

The negatives are the polarity of the lower midrange and the awful tweeter resonance.  My ears don't hear 20KHz directly, but the time distortion of this energy storage and the gross spatial distortion of the off-axis response on the top octave have affect. Also, even burglar alarms at 40KHz penetrate my skull and register on my fight or flight response so I imagine I would find this as annoying as all metal domes.  This may be playing to the British brightness bias.  Their recordings tend to be trebly and their rooms tend towards over-stuffed which would help.