Haven’t listened to them. It’s weird that they reused the ES14 model number and called back to that famous speaker in their marketing when they didn’t make it look like the old speaker, or even like a “retro” speaker. And they used a crossover when the ES14s whole claim to fame was that the drivers, baffle, and cabinet were all carefully designed so the woofer rolled off naturally with no crossover at all and complimented the tweeter roll off which used only a single capacitor as a crossover.

Not that any of that changes the new ES14n sounding good or not. Just a weird marketing choice with all passionate pedants in one of their key customer demographics

Ruby Blue by Róisín Murphy

…if the goal of an audiophile is to get the highest quality reproduction of a recording

If yes, then yes, if no, or not only, then why not?

I’ve also been told many times that true Audiophiles don’t use Tone Controls at all and prefer the Music flat without any EQ

Yeah but people also bang on endlessly about DSP and how it’s the audiophile equivalent of god spunking in your ear holes and you can’t audiophile without it. This isn’t really a community strong on consensus despite how often individuals talk in absolutes.

I’m fairly confident that audiophiles don’t use tone controls, except for all the audiophiles that do use tone controls. Now as far TRUE audiophiles are concerned, well, true is the kind of emotional identifier people use when they wanna pretend the subjective statement they are about to make is objective