Here we come to a debate which goes back almost to the beginning of high-end audio. None other than the venerable J. Gordon Holt often made the claim that imaging and accuracy of timbre were at odds with each other. Improve one and the other suffers. J. Gordon Holt believed this has been most obvious in speaker design and it is with both caution and reluctance that I have to agree with Mister Holt. Imaging has been the direction of speaker improvement and indeed the advances have been impressive. But in the course of this advancement, accuracy of timbre has suffered. And here I may utterly sabotage the veracity of all I have above set forth with the following claim: Many of the speakers made during the 1960s and '70s had timbral accuracy that no speaker being made today can match. A good case in point involves the J.B. Lansing speakers of that era. They were uneven in the crossovers, those titanium-dome tweeters (not really titanium since they were about 95% aluminum) were bright and harsh, the midrange was not silky and pure and the bass was tubby and boomy. As to imaging, forget it. But when it came to timbral accuracy, something about the way those drivers were made or housed or wired ... well, I am not an engineer but I do know what my ears heard. A pair of mid-priced JBLs of that era had an ability to make a bass voice sound like a bass and not a baritone, a mezzo-soprano like she certainly had no claim to being an alto and a flute could never be mistaken for a piccolo. You could tell what kind of electric bass the player was using, what kind of strings he had on it and what brand amp he was running through.