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MusicLover wrote:

1. In room flat response at the listening positions

Sure, this is very essential it it done proporly. 

MusicLover wrote:

equal decay at al lfrequencies off axis

This is mostly a properly of horn bit the driver. With none-spherical horn there is no even need to consider it as everything off axis is severalty screwed with a rectangular horn.

MusicLover wrote:

Adequate delay between direct & first order reflections.

Once again, the reverberation radius is mostly not aproperty of a driver but rather the arrangement of the entire installation, the driver, the proximities, the horns rate, the natural driver's EQ, the type of the profiles and so on…

MusicLover wrote:

Lack of distortion, or suitable 2-level distortion

Perhaps, however how to estimate and to interpret them? If we are talking about the compression driver then they all made very crappy and each driver might sound very differently because the alignment, centering and many other reasons. In past I was trying to select better performing drivers using a good microphone and a distortion analyzer but I was not able to interpret what I measured and there was no relations between the measurable and auditable. I was able to say by measurements is the driver was completely screwed but the minute nuanced  of tone and contrast were completely not related to the distortion pattern

MusicLover wrote:

Decay characterisitics of the driver material (how does a pulse in an anechoic chamber decay?)

I really do not know what it would be and how it would relates to anything. Certainly the driver material is superbly important but how the anechoic chamber decay would manifest itself with tonal and contrast qualities of the driver in the real world it would be completely unknown to me. I know John Dunlavy told me that he recorded string quartets in his large anechoic chamber and was trying playing those recordings to make some further conclusions. When he told me that I almost fall asleep…

MusicLover wrote:

ANd the biggest thing: Recording quality

It is something that I completely ignore when I think about the drivers quality.

MusicLover wrote:

I like ALtec & klipsch horns. Both are very nice.

I’m not a big fan of Altecs. Their MF drivers are mostly very slow and very gray tonally. Their bass drivers better but unfortunately they never had serious enclosures to make Altec to sound responsibly good for the high demands home installations. Klipsch kind of in the same domain with Altecs only the Klipsch horns were even more disgusting then the Altecs. Ironically, although they both, Altec and Klipsch are conceded the primary US horn companies from past, but they did nothing else then applying the principles of high acoustic pressure generation and presumed that it would be good enough for Sound.. They did "survivable"  PA systems, letting the Jews to dance Hava Nagila during thier wedding ceremonies but THAT Sound has no relation to a high fidelity of Musuc reproduction. In fact, they did quite a lot of harm convincing many people (including you, MusicLover) that horns have some indispensable and non-resolvable negative characteristics.

MusicLover wrote:

I am relatively indifferent to the effects of amps & digital sources, to me they add or take away almost nothing. Comments?

My comment would be that if you resolve the problems with your loudspeakers and make them do not mask out the misery of your SS amplification then you might discover that not all amplifiers were born equal.

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