Just found this thread today, and it is very interesting to me, as I am a professional orchestral musician, and am playing in the orchestra almost daily. I am not much of a "techno geek" at all, and do not pay much attention to actual specs, numbers, etc. of different components. I rely on my ears. What they tell me basically agrees with the posters like Atmasphere and Shadorne - if you want to reproduce an orchestra at full volume, you have to go with horn speakers and tubes. Another area in which the horn speakers are superior to me is in soundstaging. This is especially important in opera, as well as symphonic music, but is also important for chamber music as well. The warmth in the tube sound is also a much more accurate reproduction of the sound of a really good concert hall than any solid-state amp I have ever heard - simply a more life-like sound (these people wanting a "neutral" sound crack me up - concert halls are definitely NOT neutral - I don't want my music sounding as dead as it does in a recording studio). The horn speaker/tube amp combination also in my opinion gives you better imaging, and certainly a much greater dynamic range. I agree with Atmasphere that the end of Das Rheingold, the Solti recording, is one of the best tests I know of for the upper end of the dynamic range. The horns also give you that directness of sound that is very similar to live music. As nice as say the Sonus Faber's sound, they are much more "laid back," as the reviewers like to say, than a live orchestra in a good hall. Yes, sometimes horn tweeters can be very much "in your face" sounding, but this is what the orchestra, or a jazz trumpet in a jazz club, or an electric guitar turned up way too much (as they almost always are) will sound like live. My gripe about the electrostats or planars, besides the fact that they don't work well with tubes because they need so much power, is that the listening spot is so small, relative to dynamic speakers or horns, and placement is way too finicky - you basically have to have a dedicated listening room to make those work properly. Horn speakers will sound great set up just about anywhere, and you can drive them with anything you want.
So I hope that the original poster does decide to take a look at horns. You can find some nice older Klipsch speakers used here on audiogon or ebay. I bought my Klipsch Cornwall 2's here on audiogon for a very good price. My uncle has the old Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater speakers, and they are some of the best I have ever heard. I am actually more familiar with the more vintage equipment than with the newer horn designs, most of which I have not heard, but in my experience, horns are the way to go. Oh, and classical music places so much more demands on the equipment (much wider dynamic range, many more different timbres to reproduce, etc.) than any other type that any speaker that is good enough for classical will certainly be good enough for anything else.
