New Speakers

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Just to add the lack of SAM does put me off the other two models, I guess I will be doing the demo with no SAM on the SFs too.

What exactly does SAM do? I have looked on the Devialet website but could not find an explanation

Here's Devialet's white paper describing SAM: http://en.devialet.com/assets/Systems/De...per-EN.pdf (the second half thereof).

I've been trying out potential new speakers myself (must write that up at some point) and faced a similar dilemma about SAM.  Some but not all of the speakers I was interested in had SAM profiles, so there was a question about whether to listen to them with SAM on or off.  At first I listened to all of them without SAM - a level playing field, as I thought - and then eventually tried SAM on the speakers that supported it.  The results were surprising, and made me re-think a decision I'd thought was pretty clear-cut.

In short, enabling SAM for some speakers made a big difference to the bass, but also seemed to make the mid-range and treble sound more "coherent", in some subtle way.  I really didn't expect that.  (Rationalising this after the fact, it might be something to do with the phase correction that SAM does.  I didn't experiment with "dialling down" SAM to see what effect that had, but that might have been an interesting thing to try.)

In the end, I chose speakers that don't have a SAM profile.  This was quite a tough decision but I preferred their sound even compared to the other speakers with SAM enabled.  Also in the back of my mind there was a nagging thought that if I bought speakers that "needed" SAM to sound their best, I might miss it if I ever switched to a different amplifier.

Not sure whether that rambling is any help to you or not...but if you get the chance to try enabling SAM, I'd say it's definitely worth doing so.  It might make all the difference.