I visited the Paradigm factory in Toronto last week and one of the things all the dealers and distributors do on any visit there is to do a blind test between 3 speakers

We didn't know what the speaker behind the acoustic panelling were. They could have been all from Paradigm, or a mixture of different speaker manufacturers - we didn't have a clue

So after we we listened to all the speakers with different types of music we gave in our results. At the end of the test we were shown the speakers we had just listended too.

One of the speakers was the Paradigm Atom and the other 2 from different well known speaker manufacturers. Here is the interesting thing. The speaker that was twice as expensive as the Atom sounded terriible.

The Atom and the remaining speaker sounded very similar with most people preferring the sound of the Atom. The thing is the other speaker which sells very well in Ireland  costs 7 times the price. I would have been very happy with either speaker all things begin equal but the difference in price meant there was only one winner.