The best speaker you ever heard?

I loved Mejames' Genesis speakers, with the big VTL AMPS running directly into a top-of-the-line Wadia, when I delivered some speakers to his house. But I didn't get to play classical, just jazz. I have heard most of the speakers on this list, under HIGHLY varying conditions. The speaker with the best ALL-AROUND capability WITH STATE-OF-THE-ART SOFTWARE (an important qualification that has to be made) I have ever heard is the Dynaudio Evidence, so when I saw a pair used and on the cheap, I bought 'em for my place in Nevada, which has a huge room (a necessity for ANY of the big, expensive, state-of-the-art designs listed here) and have never been disappointed, WITH ABOUT 60% OF MY SOFTWARE. I also loved the Dunlavy 4-A's, 5's, and 6's, the Vandersteen 5's, and Triangle Magellans. But, believe it or not, with ALL my software, the $5,000 Triangle Volante 260, in my NORMAL-sized apartment living room in Los Angeles, sounds better MORE OFTEN with a WIDER VARIETY OF MUSIC GENRES AND SOFTWARE QUALITY than anything I have ever heard.

Yo, Justubes,
I owned K-horns for 20+ years. I absolutley loved everthing about them...BUT, the 4,000 Hz - 8,000 Hz peak drove me crazy. On almost all of my classical recordings, they made the violins sound like wire, and twangy wire at that. Higher-pitched brass instruments would drive you from the room with a whanging headache. Their bass was the deepest, most natural I have EVER heard, and their legendary sensitivity made them driveable to full volume on less than a watt. Hell, I could have driven them to 100db with a battery-powered wristwatch! I kept them for 20 years for their virtues, hoping to be able to eliminate the one damnable flaw by experimenting with different electronics, etc. But no luck. I finally sold them, for TWICE what I paid for them, and the buyer was ecstatic (still is) to get 'em so cheap! Now, THAT's value!!
I never had a room that was large enough to space them 20 feet apart, though. The most I could do was around 15-16. I DID hear K-horns, with a derived center channel (the "Heresy," I believe), in an enormous room...it had to be over 40' wide. If you sat at least 30-40 feet away from them, the peak was ameliorated and they sounded fine. The guy (lives in Hong Kong) used vintage McIntosh tubes...25 watts per side. I suspect you are right, that SET's in a large, LARGE room might do the trick. You'd only need 1/2 to 1 watt to fill the LA coliseum! Even though I had no luck with 'em, it's fun to read about someone else who responded so positively to these "old" classics.
Happy listening!
Gerald Clifton

Justubes,
As I said, I finally sold them for about twice what I paid for them...and you are right, there were plenty of buyers who responded to my ad. I kept them for so long, because I thought there would SOMEHOW be a way to make them work. I moved around quite a bit, but I really think I just needed a permanent house with a HUGE listening room. Some rooms sounded better than others, of course, and I was always reluctant to let them go because of their tremendous, accurate bass and their near-perfect dispersion pattern: they filled any room wall-to-wall, and it's tough to give all that up. But I finally gave up when I had to move cross-country, and realized that I had to have something that reproduced the "silky" characteristic of massed violins in a symphony orchestra (my favorite type of music). Some smaller B&W's actually sounded better, overall, than the Khorns in my smaller apartments, because they captured the upper-mids to highs more smoothly, even though they couldn't approach the Khorn bass quality. Cheers and happy listening.
Gerald