Speakers under $50k that rival $200k+ speakers?

Directly or indirectly Ralph is affiliated with both Classic Audio and Sound Labs, so of course they are great speakers.

I walk my talk. I've shown with both companies at shows, because they make great speakers. Beyond showing with them I have no affiliation. I'd have mentioned Audiokinesis too (with whom I've also shown) but his speakers were too inexpensive to make the cut. After nearly 43 years in this business, I've yet to sell a single loudspeaker.

@smodtactical  Classic Audio Loudspeakers (CARs) are made in Brighton, MI.  The models T3 and T1 are three-way speakers employing two bass drivers, a midrange horn and compression driver tweeter.
http://classicaudioloudspeakers.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?fs=1&init=1


You can have them field-coil powered, which endows the drivers with the speed to which I referred earlier. The midrange horns employ CAD-optimized throat curves that eliminate common old-school horn artifacts;  the drivers are beryllium domes with Kapton surrounds. This means that the first breakup is at about 35KHz and an extra octave of low frequency bandwidth, so very smooth and detailed across their entire range. They are also 16 ohms so whatever amp is driving them will be lower distortion than it will on lower impedance speakers. This also makes them smoother, since the kind of distortion I'm talking about makes amps sound harsher otherwise. So they are full range (down to 20Hz) and very smooth and detailed; they also image quite well. On top of that they are easy to drive; they pretty well tick all the boxes except they aren't small.

Classic Audio Loudspeakers makes a couple of models that easily deserve this sort of comment: I've not heard any speaker more expensive that actually sounded better.

The CARs also have the benefit of being easy to drive- 16 ohms and 98dB 1 watt/1 meter, with bandwidth down to 20Hz. I've been running them for years. With field coil operation they are as fast as ESLs.

Speaking ESLs, the Sound Lab Majestic is a truly full range ESL that can deliver dynamic range as well as the transparency that usually only ESLs are known for. If you want to know the top 5 best speakers in the world, the two I've mentioned here are on the list.