I don't know what Paradigm's product strategy is. Each product family appears to have a different spinorama recipe. That doesn't seem right to me. The holy grail is to hit on a recipe that lab and market data tells you is right and then replicate that recipe for every speaker family as best as you can. That's what Axiom has done and that's why the soundstage and imaging for every one of its speakers is similar. Where they differ as one moves up in price is performance rather than functionality.
This by the way is why I hold Ian in such high regard. It takes a certain constitution, a depth of faith, to believe in the science of spinorama and work on understanding the psychoacoustic impact of the wrinkles in every curve. And to work at it over a 30 year period (the first 10 years were cutting his teeth years), refining over and over with history, new lab data and market feedback as guides, is remarkable. Who else in the industry has done that? A good question of course is when does the law of diminishing returns kick in? As I said many times on these boards, I feel that law kicked in with v4. It's maybe as far as one can take the Millenia architecture that kicked off the "M" line.
Getting back to Paradigm, maybe it hasn't figured out the recipe and is experimenting with different recipes to get market data. Maybe it had the recipe and it left as folks walked out the door. Or maybe the recipe can't be defended for whatever reason.
Did Paradigm ever have a spinorama recipe to govern all its products? Did all its speakers at one time sound similar in terms of soundstage and imaging?
Anyway, someone appears to have done very well with the 800F. Maybe that spinorama can act as a good reference recipe for Paradigm.
Edit: BTW, the Bryston line definitely has a tweaked recipe. It strives for a horizontal listening window curve instead of downward tilting.
Last edited by Mojo; 12/16/22 04:46 PM.
