Here Here on the Meadowlark Audio Comment. Pat is a great engineer and an even better guy. I have owned just about all of his commercial designs and for my tastes, they are unsurpassed. His company's demise had a lot to do with the transition from MDF to hardwood baffles and tops as well as the fully custom order capability he allowed customers and dealers. When you give the average consumer the option to choose the wood species and the stringers on the baffle, they can get really creative .................and then when they get exactly what they described, they are reluctant to accept the fact that wood is a natural product and will have inherent variations. I worked for 10 years at one of the first dealers in the country to handle Meadowlarks and we had no less than 5 pairs of custom order speakers turned back by customers who could not understand things like "Ambrosia beetles caused the amazing color variations in this maple" to mean bugs had made holes in the wood. Or things like " this ropey cherry has amazing fire and texture" to mean it ain't flat like formica!
Yet other companies can continue to produce speakers that measure poorly, sound awful and look like Salvador Dali and Walt Disney had a kid and they soldier on for decades.
Reviewers are like any other machine. They are either a benefit or a hazard. If they are a benefit, they are not my problem.