There is no reason not to enjoy and keep the older generation speakers, upgrading the gear, improving your room, and cabling and the speaker you heard for years will sound better with a different spin on reproduction, much like buying new speakers. I've had my M3 Sapphires for almost 2 1/2 years now and I am still surprised how their sound reproduction has changed and improved as I have done newer room treatments, power cord changes, and my Adona racks and amp stand support shelves are granite and real wood. When I purchased them I kept the granite side up and never thought of flipping them because I liked the look of the granite, but a few weeks ago I did, and I found I lost nothing but gained a more relaxed sound with better low-level details with the wood side up. In, short good speakers only give you what they are being fed, they don't make a sound by impacting their reproduction with coloration either highs or lows, chameleon there should be, and my M3 is such a speaker. With my room treatments, there is a depth I've never heard from a speaker, on track 6 of the XLO/Stereophile test disc they talk and walk around the studio closer to the center then left and right, and then way back in the studio and the voice changes as the distance changes and when he is in the back of the studio the whole from the wall behind the speakers becomes the studio and you feel the space and can see it, then a wood block is hit as he walks forward and you can feel and can see the wood block as it becomes closer as well as the sound/tone of the wood block change, then he does a cymbal and it should changes as he goes from the right around the room and way back in the left of the studio and the M3's track it perfect. Could I buy a new speaker sure I could buy one, now with experience of 40 years in this hobby, the M3 can change their sound as I even change power cords on my front-end gear, footers, etc. My Quad Electrostatics could do the same thing. Still, the M3s are Electrostatics but on steroids, and once the toe-in is right for your room and size they produce the same electrostatic panel type of openness, and on Mono recording the speakers are not even in the room—just a full center image with transparency. When I started in this hobby I went through speakers every few years and I enjoyed it but I learned after much money spent I was just going in circles, sometimes forward and sometimes backward, but I trained my ear from that experience and that is invaluable, because you learn when you hit the nail on the head and it won't get that much better. The speaker is only one link in the chain of an audio system, it's the messenger.
