Years of Klipsch on a Yamaha receiver

For years my main speakers were Klipsch Reference Premiere, powered by a flagship Yamaha receiver. They were dynamic, loud, energetic and very pleasing to hear. I was happy, and I had every reason to be.

My roots are in home theatre, with Yamaha, Denon and Marantz receivers on my rack over the years. The Klipsch were bought to work inside that home-theatre system, and they did the job with vividness and plenty of Klipsch magic.

When I moved to the Bowers & Wilkins Diamonds, I almost forgot about them. The Klipsch are general-purpose speakers, designed for living rooms with little or no acoustic optimisation. The Diamonds were hardcore audiophile speakers, revealing enough for critical listening and demanding competent amplification and very careful system matching.

That is not an insult to the Klipsch; it is exactly what they were designed for. A speaker that sounds great in an untreated living room on a receiver is doing a job the Diamonds could never do in the same place. The question was never which one was better, but which job I wanted done.

General purpose is a job description. Mine simply changed.