When a budget speaker is preferred to a high end one...

There will always be people who equate the $$ cost of the speaker to the quality of the speaker and overlook other factors.

Also there will be people that put measurements above everything else. They will always equate good sound with good measurements.

There will always be people who think that THEY THEMSELVES are as good at deciding how to make a good speaker than speaker engineers and designers (Peter Snell, Richard Vandersteen, Omar Bose, Jim Theil, Matt Polk, etc.)

I say just buy what makes you happy and learn to live with someone who chooses a different path, a different speaker. If you really think you can't tolerate all the bad speakers in the world, just make a pair of your own.

Without being able to hear them I took a chance on tekton. Only thing I can say is I have no regrets about that decision. They are not pretty but as an audiophile I only care about the sound.

When is a car with square wheels preferable to a car with round ones? - on a square road))

When the grandkids are over

I am cheating here since the high end speaker I wanted was the baby brother to the Yamaha NS5000, the Yamaha NS3000, and I have not heard it. The NS5000 I have heard and thought it was great.

My son (or maybe the wife) recently put a hole in the driver of my circa 2012 KEF LS50. So I got the $1500 LS50 Meta to replace it, since I always want to have a LS50 around. I loved the sound of the LS50 Meta so much that I cancelled the plans to buy the $9K Yamaha NS3000. This was for a small room with KEF KC62 sub.

I explain this phenomena by the fact that the LS50 Meta sounded so fine.

@steve59 This is how I plan on saving my Blades from kids (and wife).

Kef Blade 2 Meta Speaker Dust Covers | DigitalDeckCovers