Manufacturers comment:
The TSM speaker system is a sophisticated/modern, high Q design. We have spent 8 years refining it to a point where all of the resonance and distortion have been damped out of the system. So, when you turn up the volume, you are amplifying the music and not the customary noise, distortion and color. These damped designs will sound better with tube amps with a higher output impedance or solid state amps with a lower damping factor and mosfets in particular.
It is also a good practice to listen to them farther away as the farther you get from them the fuller they sound (9 1/2 feet is optimum). When placing this type of design on a stand, do not decouple the speaker from the stand. Place it right on the pedestal so that energy can pass easily from the enclosure to the stand. If you are concerned about safety, a little blue tack/poster putty on the bottom of the speaker will hold it securely in place.
The bottom end of the TSM is really quite remarkable IMHO. It is -2db at 55hz, -3db at 50 and -4db at 45. It is still producing usable bass down to 35hz. Although it does not produce the lowest octave, it does accomplish exactly what it was designed to do. Smaller rooms can not support deep bass anyway. Deep bass has a very long bass wavelength that needs to be propagated and this cannot be accomplished in smaller rooms.
In North America, most amplifiers do not come terminated with a Zobel network. It is for that reason that we offer an outboard rc network. The RC will provide an unterminated amp with a 100 ohm load at 100 khz. It also acts as an ultrasonic filter of rfi and emi at 1.6 mhz. If your amp is terminated with a Zobel network and you use our RC also, the sound will suffer because you have created a tank circuit by using 2 filters in the same circuit with inductance between them. You will not hurt the amp by trying this. But if the amp is not terminated you will notice a very large improvement in the sound.
The presentation will become more uniform, clearer, smoother and show more spacial cues. A sense of false brightness will disappear and the sound will be more relaxed and fleshed out.
I was extremely pleased by the comments you made about the Morel tweeter sounding so real. This by the way is the Morel USA version. The new cryogenically treated crossover networks have improved the sound so much that the TSM MM/Morel MDT-30 combination actually sounds better than the VSM M/Esotar. This is quite a bold statement to make but it has been said by many and not just me.
Of course, the the new VSM MM and MX are better again. The point I am making is that the drivers are very important but the way they are implemented is even more so. And last of all the terminals. These terminals are a brilliantly designed piece because they rid the connector of two serious problems, those being metal stress from over tightening and the threads.
Threads cause skin effect and a general smearing of the HF and metal stress causes a pinching or stressing of the sound.
IMO, this is evident in almost every other conventional binding post. Bananas do not sound good and you can clearly hear their resonance through our speaker designs. The issue of their user friendly nature, well, after you get used to them and use them for a while you’ll find a way of accomplishing what you need that is far easier than conventional posts. Plus, you can tighten them as hard as you can without deforming anything which is a must for heavy/awkward cables.
I agree with your description of what a monitor is and what it should do. Because of the nature of the design, bass energy and extension will never rival larger floor standing models. But this increased energy cannot be used in small rooms anyway because it will just beat on the room resonant frequency. However, the mid and high frequencies can be as good as products costing many times more so these properly executed monitor designs can provide some of the best value in sound reproduction.