I'm thinking of another angle to this. From Thomann's side, it's about profit. While it's nice to get great sales from the A306, there is the question of margins.. It could be that the A306 could cannibalize their sales of other monitors with possibly higher margins. But what do I know. A spinorama of the A308 would have been good to have. cos its the same price as the A306, on Thomann.
Thinking aloud, the quest for audio clarity is a never ending rabbit hole, and the speaker is only one component. One has to balance many things
1. What are you listening to - e.g lossy Youtube and free Spotify - is it worth spending on super high quality speakers, or better to pay for a higher quality streaming service, like Tidal
2. Room acoustics, placement, etc.
3. Quality of D/A conversion - albeit, I would like to think that most audio converters released in the most recent 5 years would be adequate - but my own subjective listening tests, have proved otherwise. I can hear differences between objectively measured supposedly identical converters, in this case between a Samsung dongle DAC and an Apple dongle DAC, clearly I hear a difference, but measurement wise, there should be no difference, from published reviews/comparison.
4. Room size/listening distance.
5. Two way or Three way speakers (i.e drivers)
6. Directivity, which can translate into which speaker will be easier to apply some DRC, to improve its performance.
7. Reliability
8. Budget
A brief look at the various speakers in this price range of the A306, such as the JBL305/308, Kali's (various -LP and IN models), Adam Audio TV's, Mackie MR's, leaves me with the impression that every one of these speakers is compromised, to fit a budget. Every review has a - very nice speaker for the price, but it has X, Y, Z flaws. Median price of these will be about £450 per pair (across the various ranges)
It's until one gets to the next level in quality such as the Neumann KH series, the new ones with DSP, at a price bracket 3 to 6 times the cost of the median of the budget speakers, does one get to another level of performance with ruler flat frequency responses straight out of the box, with no tuning, in-built potential for tuning with the manufacturers own microphone, as an option, and the potential to "tune" this even further with custom DRC.
It's great to get to a point where you pick a speaker and accept it's flaws, and just move on - to actually listen to the audio/music for whatever purpose you bought the speaker, and spend the next 5 to 10 years satisfied, with what you have.
The niggling thought at the back of my mind is reliability. Not sure if the Swissonics have that assurance, and I would not want to be a guinea pig, for manufacturing defects, and component failures.
Unfortunately this important criteria of reliability is one that is typically associated with the BRAND. And takes a while to build. My money at the end of the day, unless I had some to spare for an experiment, and I had my fallback/fallforward speakers already, would be - choose as speaker from some more reliable, higher reputation brand, and apply DRC (or just the basic EQ features at the back of the active speaker - which is the most elementary DRC)to even out any anomalies.
Unfortunately Spinorama type evaluations, and all the reviews in the world, tell us very little about the durability/reliability of any product. With cars, I recall after a year or two, one would have reviews which at least gave an impression of use after a while. With speakers, we never have such reviews.
Let's admit, if we had the money - just buy something like a pair of the new Neumann KH 150's and add some DRC, to improve the in-room performance, job done. And if you want room shaking bass, add a sub, or two subs (one per side)
