$25k speakers, are we there yet?

ASR members walk away. For the rest of us.

Well there is something to be said for speakers that have good FR, IR, do not suffer compression, and have well behaved radiation pattern. And then we can talk about cabinet resonances, or a lack of them.

Whether one likes measurements or not, the speaker designers that are not using measurements, and do not provide the, can sometimes be viewed as hiding something.

These big expensive speakers really do need the stars to align for us to ever reach their potential so when my last speakers didn’t do well with the source I had instead of upgrading the source I swapped speakers. What do you need to hear/see/know about your speakers to take the next step and build a 20 year system around them?

It was not overly difficult years ago to find a set.
They have lasted a few decades.
The rest of the system is now to the point that maybe I should consider a speaker upgrade.

What are your goals for speakers?
Musicality? Or something that is neutral and accurate/correct?
Without some “goodness” metric it is hard to agree one what is good… or to compare two speakers and find one is more good than another.

@bigkidz +1

(I don’t also think that room treatment changes the direct sound.)

What do you need to hear/see/know about your speakers to take the next step and build a 20 year system around them?

I think if you are near NJ, then you have a solid offer from BigKids.
If you are elsewhere, then there are other good places.

I have heard some great speakers at $5K, $10k, $20k and $40k.
I am, totally confident that I could put together a great system from any of them.
So it doesn’t matter a whole lot as they generally do not have  much in the way of flaws at those price points.

I am really looking hard at a $5k set, in fact I am pretty committed, but it all went a bit sideways.
 

Yeah we still need front ends, and room treatments are seldom a bad thing. Minor treatments can sometimes even pass a WAF test.