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Oh yes they are. A really nice pair can fascinate you for life.
I returned JA's smile with a blush. "Yeah," I admitted. "I mean, I've been attracted to lots of different speakers for awhile now. But I really love the DeVores."
JA's eyes glowed with a kind of knowledge. Or was it a kind of happiness? Or was it some sort of appreciation of my innocence?
JA's eyes glowed with something like that. "It's okay to love more than one pair of speakers," he explained. "Speakers aren't like women."
You have now begun the quest for the Holy Grail of Speakerdom. It is a long and some times exhausting journey, not without its pleasurable moments to be sure, but the eternal question will keep arising: What about....Stephen, you are soooo hooked now. That glow in JA's eyes was the same as," ""I could have told you so"".
You can't get new speakers until you have exhausted every known and unknown tweak on this pair. I think that's an unwritten law or something. First, you have to stack a pile of magazines on each speaker, recable at least 3 or 4 times, place absorbent stuff on the side walls, experiment with toe-in, move'em in and out a few times, soft spikes, hard spikes, tilt up, tilt down, step on the spiked stands about a hundred times, level them, step on the stands, level them again, change the brass connection couplers with solid wire if they are bi-wire type, order $100 worth of jumpers and finally knock them off the stands putting a nice dig in the cabinet...then you can sell them for half of what you paid. Oh, wait, you haven't tried draping a blanket over the sides and back of the speakers yet...
Well, at the very least, he should try the $1.20 Sam Tellig coin tweak. I showed a recording engineer friend this years ago, and to this day, he still uses the 6 coins on his monitors in his home studio. At one point, he removed them, but," put them back because his setup sounded better with the coins in place; the midrange sounds fuller and there's more depth to the imaging when the coins are in place. I get the sense that the coins ""sing"" along with the music and add some pleasing harmonics.