First off, Harry you've had some amazingly good speakers. For you to compliment Sapphires says a lot.
Secondly, Bill, I know you didn't ask me the question, but I use my Sapphires, Essence center, and on-wall Emeralds with a Denon 1600 DVD, Arcam 72T CD player, Parasound 1205A amp, and an Integra 9.4 preamp/processor. For one or two days, due to the sale of my Rotel 1066 pre/pro, I did have them hooked up to a Sherwood Newcastle receiver. You'd expect my Integra/Parasound combo to outdo the Sherwood Newcastle and they readily did. Nonetheless, with the Sherwood, they still sounded wonderful to my ears. These are extremely musical speakers and I agree with Harry that they're very non-fatiguing. I also agree with Mike's communication that they were designed to be forgiving. Most everything sounds good with them, whereas with my headphone set up of the Sennheiser HD 650's paired with a Perreaux headphone amp, some things are just unpleasant to listen to. On those, you hear every ugly bit of information there is due to their extremely revealing nature.
Hope this helps a bit.