What vintage speaker might you use today

Doug Schroeder needs to hear an "extreme" (his word) vintage speaker system.  If he does, I predict he will change his opinion that vintage is only suited for "lower end systems" (his words).  To be clear I am not talking about speakers you will find at yard sales.  For example, I am thinking of the pair of Western Electric 757 speakers at the 2011 RMAF.  That system had an engaging musical realism unlike any modern speaker in my experience.

Douglas completely misunderstood the original question. Extreme system is not the point of this thread. Onhwy61 simply stated that instead of building an extreme system some folks may want to instead just listen to music. I among many others happen to agree. Doug your an elitist snob.

JBL L300- with original MC275. Not bad.

Jbl L-7 ,  4 way speaker's,  titanium laminated tweeter,  cross over at 900 htz, 30htz to 27khz, bi-amp  speaker's that hugely improve with high quality speaker  post jumper cable's from bottom post to top post,  very musical, with a unsuspected excellent sound stage, naturalness, transit speed is off the charts for a 1992 speaker. 

Salectric,

I agree with you about extreme vintage systems.  I heard a monster set up in a huge dedicated room that sounded magnificent.  It was based around a Western Electric 555 midrange driver and a 15A horn and twin 18" woofers (looked tiny in this system).  Nothing cheap here, the system was originally triamped using three pairs of Audio Note Gaku-On amps ($250,000 per pair list price), but, when it turned out that the tweeter sounded as good with a "cheap" Kageki, one of the pairs of Gaku-On was relegated to the role of back up amp.  This type of large horn system is pretty unmatchable for the ability to deliver proper scale, sense of ease and natural flow and excellent dynamics at low volume level.

My much more modest horn-based system is no slouch either, provided I don't play it super loud (I never do that anyway).  It is built around the Western Electric 713b compression driver, twin 12" woofers in an Onken bass reflex cabinet and a not that great Fostex bullet tweeter.  Not "extreme" by some standards, but not bad either.  

There are a few vintage speaker components that I would take over anything made these days, except, perhaps, for some really good Japanese replicas of the same drivers.  I heard a fantastic, and reasonably compact, system built around the Jensen M-10 field-coil driver; I haven't heard too many systems sound better.  It is unfortunate that some of these drivers, in good shape, go for around $20,000 per driver (and you may need to buy several to come up with a matched pair).

On the not-too-crazy front, a 302 b compression driver, some RCA compression drivers, BTH compression drivers can be used to make systems that, for some people's taste, will sound better than almost any conventional system out there.  Vintage can be both "extreme" in terms of performance, and budget-friendly.