I put "cone" in quotes because the Performance system's diaphragms aren't cones at all, but what JBL calls "Elliptical Oblate Spheroidal (EOS) waveguides." What the hell, you might well ask, are those? An elliptical oblate is a flattened sphere, like a...

It's an article of faith among audiophiles that you can "hear" materials. It just stands to reason that, if a loudspeaker cone has a certain sound when tapped with a fingernail, then everything it reproduces will be colored by that sound. This is why...