I agree it’s a little bit of bias on Ascend’s part to paint them as universally loved, and that he’s making them even better while simultaneously claiming the prior version has no real flaws.
I empathize with the difficulty in maintaining a balanced perspective though when running a small business exposing your products to a lot of fan mail and hate mail alike. My understanding is that in situations like these, you have to either filter out all the negative comments from the internet out to maintain your sanity, OR hire someone to survey your customers for honest constructive criticism (where having a 3rd party as a “psychological negativity buffer“ is a key detail). Perhaps Ascend should do the latter.
If they did, they’d hear from me that I wasn’t too thrilled with my Lunas either. They worked fine as rear surrounds, but I agree they didn’t sound “quite right”. Certainly not on the same level as the Towers and 2EX I had.
I also empathize. Improving a product can be difficult because it devalues the previous version. I get the impression that the same guy doing the design is also doing the marketing at Ascend, which is why they should be commended for being so candid about their problems and the way they go about solving them.
I'm not particularly enticed by any of Ascend's products, but there are a lot of things I really like about them:
1. Domestically produced
2. Very inexpensive, despite having nice bamboo cabinets and very high end drivers (a RAAL at these price points is unheard of)
3. Been in business a long time, presumably a decent second-hand market
4. Inept, unsophisticated marketing because the proprietors are more concerned about buying an NFS and a CNC for prototyping than blowing smoke up everyone's aperiodic vent.
Also with the CEA 2034 score, you have to look at it from the perspective of a small speaker producer. Harman develops this metric, and then makes speakers which hit that metric better than any other speaker. How can you compete? The metric is obviously valid to a large degree, and certain sound preferences seem to be almost universal, but I think it is important that different producers offer different intentional deviations from this 'ideal' to suit different musical tastes and use cases. Obviously FR and DI should always be fairly smooth, but I really believe that bass quantity and quality and treble and upper mid dispersion are two areas where some deviation is warranted.
I've often said that for me, there's no one speaker which would suit all my musical taste. I would love a wide dispersion, immersive speaker with less image specificity and more atmosphere for my living room. Something like Ascend's RAAL speakers, or the BMR monitors, or maybe even a Dipole design. For listening at my work computer, active monitors are better. If I had room for a big home theater, my Gedlee's and subs would be ideal.
Long story short, I need a bigger house.