In applications where the you have either a highly reflective room, and/or a very large room, and/or you sit far away from the speakers, the reverberant sound will play an especially large role in establishing timbre.
The reason is, these three conditions result in the reverberant sound that arrives at your ears conveying considerably more energy than the first-arrival sound does.
Under such circumstances, a speaker that does an exceptionally good job of generating a spectrally correct reverberant field is desirable. Another way of saying this is you want a speaker with a smooth power response (the power response is the summed omnidirectional response of the speaker). I can go into more detail about these subjects if you would like.
The Klipshorns and the Deuvels mentioned above are two speakers that do a very good job of getting the reverberant field right. In general, cone-and-dome speakers don't do a very good job in this regard because the power response is not smooth due to the large variations in the drivers' radiation patterns.
Other speakers that do an exceptionally good job with the reverberant field include models from Avantgarde, Classic Audio Reproductions, Edgrhorn, PiSpeakers, Mirage, GedLee, Magnepan, SoundLab, Linkwitz Orion, Audio Artistry, SP Technology, Gradient, Shahinian, MBL, and Tannoy. No doubt I've left some out. Disclaimer - I'm a dealer for some of these. I also manufacture a couple of reverberant-field-friendly speakers, which will be making their debut at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in a couple of weeks.
Lovesmusic, will the speakers be placed close to walls, or stand out in the room away from walls? Is corner placement an option?
Thanks,
Duke
