I've started to wonder how much mood and hormones(like endorphins) might affect these reviews. Objectively these are one of the best speakers we've ever seen. Not quite Genelec/Neumann tier, but somewhere around Revel(M105/M106) and KEF(R3) tier.
It's interesting to compare this review to the review of the Revel M55XC. This SVS measures excellently(top 5%), yet sounds bad. The Revel M55XC measures terribly(bottom 10%), yet sounds excellent(golf panther tier).
PS.
It's kinda funny how this site has changed my views of audio science. It's changed my views in the opposite way I expected it to. After reading the Harman threads on AVS and then reading Toole's book, I was absolutely convinced that I could base future purchasing decisions 100% on spinorama measurements, and that would guarantee that I got great sound. I was also convinced that you could (with near certainty) predict which speaker should be preferred based on spinorama alone. I found this site after reading Toole's book, and I was so happy; other people who see audio the same way I do!!!
I expected this site to reinforce my beliefs in the science of Toole/Olive, but it's kinda done the opposite. I was the guy over on AVS constantly arguing with the subjectivists who said "you can't tell if a speaker sounds bad just by looking at measurements", or "you can't tell if a speaker is good just by looking at measurements", and it frustrated me to no end how much they seemed to ignore the established science. However, in an odd twist of fates, this site - Audio Science - has kinda, in a way, proved the subjectivist right. Spinorama measurements really aren't sufficient to characterize the quality of a loudspeaker(as Toole had led me to believe). It really is possible to have a speaker with an excellent spinorama that sounds bad(SVS Ultra), and it really is possible to have a speaker with a terrible spinorama that sounds excellent(Revel M55XC).
Something that Amir said in that Revel thread really resonated with me, and really made me start to put more weight into his subjective opinion, and that was he has huge incentive to get the subjective listen right. With this speaker, he listened to it after seeing the measurements, so he had a HUGE bias to make him believe this speaker sounded great, and yet he was able to ignore that bias and be honest with what he heard. I would still rather him listen before measuring, but in this case, the fact that he measured first actually makes me believe the subjective impression more.
Anyway, reviews like this (where the subjective and objective are so at odds) are the most interesting to me, and I think they have the best potential to advance our understanding of the science.