Might. The contrast against my usual 6.5" 2-way monitors manifested as expected. Far larger line-of-sight surface so seriously more displaced direct-sound air registered extra punch, crack and density in the upper bass then extended those qualities into the high 30s. It meant more black in the overall colour palette to feel heavier and thicker. More robust. Quelle surprise. The bigger speaker sounded meatier and mightier. Then the yeah-but brigade had their own day in the sun. Explaining their victory is Your Honour who couldn't define pornography but knew it when he saw it. It seems cheap to invoke as enabler the lack of a classic frequency divider trying to stitch together two drivers to work as one. Just so, v5's midrange suchness—a mix of tacitness, presence, intimacy—and how this informed my participation in and perception of the tunes was superior. If you've not heard this difference, these are just words. They translate no more than the famous four blind men asked to describe an elephant by touch alone. "His legs are like marble columns." If you've heard it at least once before, recognizing it is a very simple quick "aha, gotcha, fab" notice. For me it leads to an immediate inner relaxation. Perhaps it's like being used to wearing correction specs and suddenly realizing that for mysterious reasons, we no longer need their contraption on the bridge of our nose, with two frames defining our lateral vision which we must learn to tune out.

Whilst the EnigmAcoustics sounded mightier, the Audience flightier, the latter had more of that headphone sense of hardwired brain implant; of some subtle but meaningful barrier having up and left. And it's not as though my before barrier was problematic. Neither is going back to wearing glasses. We get used to them. Just so, denying a difference is silly. In a similar sense, the v5 felt like listening without on-ear glasses. Making sense of the music was easier. Would you notice it if your listening habits keyed primarily into frequency response, dynamics or timbres? I wouldn't know. For a very long time now I've been convinced that at least personally, time fidelity is far more important than a linear amplitude response. Minor deviations in the latter I quickly process like a dear friend's foreign accent and atypical cadence which give her personality. It's only problematic if her accent is so thick that I can't understand every other word. That would represent coarser amplitude deviations which really need fixing.

When a speaker suffers fewer time-domain errors, I find that listening gets a bit more psychic. It's like listening to a lover speak and nearly knowing what she'll say just before she does. We feel unusually connected or synced up. On the same wavelength. Trekkies will cue the Vulcan mind meld. If you can apply my wordy pointers to the listening experience rather than measurement graphs and raw specs, you'll have the gist of the v5 difference versus my usual 2-ways. If you think this entire train of thought rambling fluff, your hearing habits could be so focussed on other aspects that time fidelity is irrelevant. Seeing how multi-way speakers with often very complex filters absolutely dominate the market whilst single or augmented widebanders live on a small rock inhabited by just puffins and visited rarely then only by truly obsessed twitchers, it seems foregone conclusion. Most listeners aren't very or at all sensitive to phase shift or a ragged impulse response. Now the fight/flight response to v5 relative to high cost, limited LF bandwidth and max SPL is likely to be flight. Run away as fast as your wallet can. To fight for them requires different priorities. And yes, saying so is an exercise in redundancy and obviousness. It just doesn't make it any less true; nor that this puffin man felt right in his element.

MSRP for monetary setback-reality problem? Being the right type of twitcher to fully appreciate v5's different feathers, would I buy two for my desktop? No. That's because my isobaric 4" SuperMon Mini in the upstairs system sell far half, have equivalent bandwidth, are just as nicely finished if in anodized aluminium with selectable fascia colours and play to the same general widebander strengths with Mark Fenlon Alpair 4 metal-cone drivers rear-loaded by hidden mates of the same size plus ports. After their review, I bought my loaner pair then had to fight Ivette not to abscond with it. Neither of us play in the box of piano-gloss lacquers. We in fact despise them as fingerprint magnets and the inevitable swirl marks that develop whilst dusting them off. In my book, such finishes only ever look perfect when brand new. After that it's a steady showy decline into sundry marks, blemishes and spot-lit dust. There's obviously demand for this look. Camerton and Voxativ for just two pursue it, too. To the right audience it connotes luxury, exclusiveness and having arrived. It's just not the rocky outpost of rural Puffin Man who additionally if quietly to himself thinks that Audience just priced themselves into a tight corner. But to each their own so from me no more on mundane mammon. Purely on sonics run solo off my desktop on sufficiently tall stilts toed in face on, I loved v5 just as I suspected I might going into this gig. Again like linear well-vented headphones, tonal balance is lighter so groomed for transparency and resolution over a typical tower speaker's enhanced gravitas and far greater warmth from phase shift and box talk. Out-of-the-head-enormous headfi sound on the desktop really is my idea of an excellent fit and spec fit for purpose. v5 gets my top reco for such scenarios. That's if one's primary diet isn't electronica peppered with synth bass. That really wants an extra octave of reach. Adding a sub to a desktop is certainly possible. It's just not my notion of a tidy compact minimalist setup for an office system.

David & Goliath?

Daisy & Geila as female stand-ins not of Biblical proportions? Juxtaposing my usual monitor adjusted to height for my tall office chair against v5 on the grandest I can make our Track Audio stand with all six pillar segments installed reiterated it. Far bigger cubic volume alone will already reach deeper and louder. Just so, returning to what in this contest was Geila/Goliath reiterated all of the above time-fidelity comments. The M1 played it clearly blurrier and fuzzier from down below which tainted its midrange by comparison. Without the hindsight of a direct comparo, you'd not call out the M1 for those demerits. By immediate contrast it was simply crystal that the bigger box's warmth wasn't just from far more bass but temporal blur and overhang. Stripping away such faux warmth which headphones confirm isn't on the recording doesn't become stark or cold unless it's simply a very poor recording. Instead it just cleans out cobwebs, murkiness and ringing for more even top-to-bottom clarity and separation. It's higher resolving power so truer to the recording. It's where between these two speakers, smaller stood taller.