Wow, this thread may get interesting...
My point is if you had your several year Diamonds in the same room with the same equipment and demo material you can make more declarative statements regarding comparisons
I would never dispute what you say you just heard with the D3's now, but you cannot convince many people that you can can make that granular a comparison with the aforementioned variables, especially the enormous passage of time
Nonetheless enjoy them
To be honest, my whole point is that you are wrong. The same thing that would allow someone to make a declarative statement in your scenario allows someone to make a declarative statement in my scenario. The things you think are making the situation similar enough for an apples to apples comparison, is obviated by the time it takes to set them up exactly the same way, because of the way audition memory in the human brain functions! This is basic brain science. Your brain has completely erased the experience of the last speaker from its memory by the time you have switched speakers. Since we are really using templates for comparison, because the audition memory window is too small for the above exercise, all we really need to do to make comparisons is to eliminate as much room response as possible with a good setup in a rectangular room where we can listen in the near field.
If you set up a speaker well in any decent rectangular room and sit in the near field, you will eliminate a good deal of the room response. This is because the speakers are far enough away from the walls that reflections will be ambience instead of smearing the sound, and the person is seated far enough from the back and side walls that the direct sound is primary to all else. This equalizes any room enough with other rooms (assuming the rooms are rectangular and not square or some odd shape) to make them relatively null.
See the key here is that it doesn't matter if you are in the same room or not when comparing speakers. Your audition memory isn't long enough to remember what it heard with the other speaker. What your brain is doing is just fitting templates for what it believes your are listening to and seeing how well it fits. When it fits terribly, your mind doesn't know what the sound is at all. When it fits OK, your mind identifies it but it lacks realism. When it fits perfectly it sounds like the object is in the room.
Even when comparing speakers in the same room, you are relying on what fits your template at the time, and are never really comparing the speakers. By the time you switch speakers, you have already forgotten what the first one sounded like. In fact, your imagination is already coloring everything and making it a rather subjective experience even though you think you are being objective. If I use any other anchor point (besides acoustic guitar and the human voice) for what speaker sounds more realistic to me, I could spend days, weeks, months, going back and forth with my vivid imagination creating all kinds of imaginary fantasies about the equipment because my brain had already long forgotten the real stimulus and my mind made up all kinds of interesting narratives or recreated false memories of the event on the fly. People love to pretend they are being objective in situations like this, but the truth is that there is nothing objective about it if you are thinking analytically while listening to the sound. You're constantly getting in your own way at that point.
With acoustic guitar and voice, assuming they are not run through effects, in a correctly set up environment, I can leave it completely to my right brain and experience whether it sounds real to me or not. If you listened to a Panasonic Tape Deck portable boom box and then switched it out with a pair of 802Ds, would you hear the difference? Would the room matter then, or is it a no brainier that one will always fit your template for an instrument better? If your templates are fine tuned enough for a specific instrument, and the room is set up for minimal interference with near-field listening, the room is not an overpowering issue. The mid-range and higher frequencies will not be as affected by the room nodes as the bass frequencies. This actually makes acoustic guitar a great instrument to size up speakers with because a good portion of the instrument will not be highly affected by room nodes. Your brain's templates will find an easier fit and smooth out some of the inconsistencies and the sound will be more holographic. Anyway, I've ranted long enough....
Thanks! I will enjoy them!!