I rather like those. They're not everybody's cup of tea though.
The cloth cone surrounds can get a bit hard and as you say the controls can get noisy. If I recall, there's no proper crossover, just a cap in series with the tweeter.
I had a set of these sounding quite sweet on the end of a Rogers Ravensbrooke amp, although the tweeter is not the most revealing or refined. Wouldn't mind another pair to play with some time.
It is impossible for anything digital to sound analogue, because it isn't analogue!