The best speaker you ever heard?


In my opinion, the speaker is by far the most important part of the audio system. After all, it is the only part you hear. OK, the other stuff really matters a lot, but without a great speaker... No go.

I am a bit 'speaker-obsessed' I guess, and now I am wondering: What are the best speakers you have ever heard, and what made them the best?
njonker
Having heard all Tidal Speakers on many occasions the past 3 years I can honestly say that "Benefits by themselves"and "benefits considering the price difference" is sth totally different. I do not see benefits as well from the Piano Diacera to the Sunray but that is "considering the price difference". ;-)

But if price didnt matter of course the Sunray is a better speaker overall than the Contriva Diacera.

Just my 2$
Easy!! IMHO, that depends on 6 simple, elegant criteria:
(0) How good is your hearing? Has it been tested lately?
(1) Is your target live unamplified music or highly engineered rock-type sound? Do you own a variety of instruments you keep as reference, to ensure you don't end up barking up the wrong tree?
(2) Do you want musical transparency, or sheer power that will - or at least can easily - shake the walls?
(3) Do you want to feel like there are instruments playing in front of you, or do you want "an awesome stereo, dude!" that might well exude details?
(4) Does your available space have appropriate acoustics, either to recreate the feeling of a concert hall, or to simply accommodate a 5-piece instrument orchestra?
(5) Do you have others who can blind/double-blind A/B with you, and whose opinions you can use as confirmations or refutations of your hunches?
(6) At what budget? Seriously, I doubt that any $500 stereos will blow away $30,000 audiophile set-ups.

The "correct" answer will depend on your combination of choices from questions above.

I don't proclaim to be an expert, but I will say this:
I have heard many fancy sound systems in many places, and found most sounding horribly unnatural, requiring (re)training, i.e. listening until your mind plays a trick on you: your hearing apparatus adjusts (which may take about 15-30 min). I won't have any of that.
To me, not much matches the realism of Magneplanars; when different guests have avoided walking into my house in fear of 'disturbing people practicing music inside', I knew I had to have been doing something right! Especially when it was none of the baby grand, drum set, lute, guitar and other goodies sitting there that were doing the trick! Having gone through 4 pairs of Maggies over a quarter-century, I am now comfy with my Tympani IV's, driven by a relatively clean and adequate Harman/Proceed "ML" 431 workhorse, a Mark Levinson LNP-2 preamp, a Bryston BDA-1 DAC transforming various digital sources.
In a 45-ft long space consisting of a 14ft wide living-room extending straight (other than a peninsula) into the kitchen, there's a lot of space for my 9ft x 6ft "wall of sound"-waves to harmonize.
Is it live or is it Memorex? My friends get the discerning challenge when I blend live instruments with recordings played at exacting life-like levels. The answer? It's both!
There may be better stuff out there, but I am not jealous.
Hope this helps.
The newer TAD Reference One. Very hard to find a US dealer as they have focused on international sales up to this point. I've heard them at RMAF the last three years in a row and thought them the best at show each time. This is not easy to do considering the very high end competition there. I also work around high end product daily and have for over 35 years, but more importantly, I'm used to working around live music, so it is not easy to impress me upon playback. So my company, Audio Video Logic, signed on and will have them in stock before the end of December 2010.

We have a TAD seminar planned for January 27th, 2011 with Andrew Jones (the designer) attending. In addition to the Reference One, we will also have the TAD Compact Reference One in stock which was just given a stupendous review in the Absolute Sound in September. Go to
www.audiovideologic.com for details.