Want to hear a sad story? I dreamed I visited the Ascend 'factory' which turned out to be in a really old shopping mall's basement, and it was HUGE, probably the size of four football fields. I was in the neighborhood and just walked in without an appointment and walked around. It was super dusty and had metal beams and scraps on tables and stuff which had nothing to do with speakers... I wanted to hear the towers but unfortunately none were functional; none had woofers, but an employee then offered to build me a tower with NrT tweeter so that I could hear it lol
Then Dave showed me his prototype Sierra tower. It of course had no drivers, just empty cabinet, but a really funky curved cabinet. In the end, it would have a RAAL tweeter, mid, two woofers, and a large (15 inch) bass woofer on the side with radiator, it was quite amazing... Oh!! And I remember he asked me how much I thought it was going to be and then he said 7500$, and I thought that was quite expensive but there would probably be a market for them. lol
Then there was one regular Sierra tower finally completed, but it was time for me to leave and join some friends but I couldn't really leave to because they had gone through so much trouble to build that one speaker so I could hear it... And so I politely listened to that one speaker, in the factory, on a super crappy chair sitting against a wall, and the environment was so bad I could barely hear anything from that one speaker, and then Dave wanted me to hear the RAAL to see if I could tell the difference, and so he was manually replacing the tweeter, and when it was finally done I had largely forgot how the NrT sounded and couldn't hear any difference... LOL Then I went out and met some old friend and things got even weirder but that's another story...
Oh well, note:
This has nothing to do with reality (I'm sure the actual Ascend is exremely clean and all), simply the very strange dreams of a guy who has weird dreams