It's encouraging that Clayton is finally getting away from compression drivers. Maybe Spatial's will start sounding more relaxed without that compression driver/horn shout.
You're right about the compression drivers sounding on the "shouty" side but they also have a "liveness" that I haven't heard duplicated through any other driver type. And they
can sound relaxed with naturally-recorded material. So I'm not entirely convinced about the move away from compression drivers: it may be a case of substituting extra "refinement" for the incredible immediacy of the older design. At the moment, I'm moving from speaker (Barefoot mm12) to speaker (Spatial Audio M4 TurboS) to get the benefits of each - refinement and bass extension with one, immediacy and imagery with the other.
I have a few other reservations about the newer designs. First of all, they're a lot more expensive and it appears that you're paying for baffle material and new drivers. Now, even though my M4 TurboS baffle vibrates dramatically, i don't hear any muffling or wooliness in the sound. In fact, I would like a little more warmth and bloom and if baffle resonance contributes to that then I'm all for it. So more expensive and deader baffles may not make a major positive difference to the sound, from my point of view. Next, the new designs are not co-axial so I'm guessing the imagery isn't as good. Third, you seem to be getting less woofer to achieve ostensibly more bass. For instance, The M4 has TWO twelve inch woofers to get what I hear as a gradual roll-of below maybe 120 Hz (at 6dB an octave this makes it only 6dB down at 60 Hz and maybe 10 at the specified 42 Hz).
With, say, the X5, you're getting a SINGLE twelve-inch woofer to do all the bass work up to 90Hz and you're paying three and a half times the price of the M4 TurboS to get this. Now, no doubt this is a simplistic way of looking at things: the new woofer may move a lot more air than the old one; it is active and there's probably an electronic boost to give it extra bass, so I may be comparing apples with oranges. Even so, I'm sceptical that the new designs are superior in every single respect to the older, cheaper designs. But I may be wrong.
