Dude!
I was so interested in this thread I just joined the forum to add this comment
I'm really curious to hear more detail from you in terms of your impressions of the Pulsars.
I'm in a similar situation. I have a wonderful large set of Thiel 3.7 speakers (and some others) that are ergonomically and aesthetically a bit big for my room. Sound-wise they work perfectly - my room acoustics are great and the speakers are incredible. But if I can downsize a bit it would work better in the room aesthetically. So I've been on a speaker search for months now testing all sorts of different models, seeing if I could find something smaller that would still sound big enough for me. And like anyone here I'm picky as hell - for me an accurate, beautiful timbral quality to voices and instruments come first, and after that dynamics, soundstaging etc. The problem is the Thiels are so great, even more expensive speakers are letting me down when I audition them.
Then I heard a demo of the Joseph Audio Pearl 3s at a show and I was amazed not only by the clarity, but by the gorgeous tonal quality to voices. It was special. So I hunted down a Joseph dealer, and first auditioned the Pulsars. They were terrific, but since they also had the floor-standing Perspective models I decided to check them out. Whoa! THOSE babies really grabbed me - I felt they had an even more impressive midrange, but with a fuller, deeper sound, with great texture in the upper bass region. I home auditioned the Perspectives and in most aspects they blew me away. They are really the only speaker that made me think I could let go of the Thiels and I'd be trading up in some aspects of the sound.
My ears hear with the Josephs what other have said about them: an amazingly liquid sound due to what seems like a super low noise floor, just pure sound that comes out of a black background. "They are quiet between the notes" as one person put it. They are super clear, with zero hash to the sound, and seem to just nail the sound of voices and instruments. One of the best midrange tonality I've heard in a speaker. All that, and they are both very compact and perfect sized for my room, and among the nicest looking speakers I've seen.
So at this point I'm saving some pennies for the Perspectives, unless some other speaker shows up to take their place.
And, BTW, I also own MBL speakers - the stand mounted 121 version. They share to my ears similarities to the Joseph sound - liquid, incredibly refined in how they present detail, and able to reproduce a rainbow of timbral sounds convincingly.
They just don't go quite as low as I want for a main speaker (and I hate subs), so I just throw them in the system now and then, marveling at what they do.
Anyway, I was going to suggest you check out the Perspectives since they will give you that bigger sound, yet at a size even smaller than the Pulsar with stands. But it seems you settled on the Pulsars which is great, and I'd love to hear more about it.
Cheers!