Once you decide on how much you can spend on speakers, the question becomes one of how you want to have that divided between aesthetics and performance.
Vandersteen is probably the king of functionality - spend all the money on performance and when you have your speaker done, stick it in a sock wasting very little of the budget on looks.
Other end? Probably the Italians, but that different weighing of aesthetics over sound is also covered in North America by people like Avalon.
Question is, would you rather have speakers that have the finish of a Stradivarius violin, or one that put more emphasis on sound quality. At any given price level, my preference would always go to performance over beauty. The only sound room I have that arguably reflects both has Martin Logan CLS which seem to have managed a nice balance of both.
Vandersteen is probably the king of functionality - spend all the money on performance and when you have your speaker done, stick it in a sock wasting very little of the budget on looks.
Other end? Probably the Italians, but that different weighing of aesthetics over sound is also covered in North America by people like Avalon.
Question is, would you rather have speakers that have the finish of a Stradivarius violin, or one that put more emphasis on sound quality. At any given price level, my preference would always go to performance over beauty. The only sound room I have that arguably reflects both has Martin Logan CLS which seem to have managed a nice balance of both.