Are these damned brands or not good speakers?

Cheers soundsrealaudio.

Large companies have no soul and don't care what their gear sounds like. 

All of them?

Why did you get out of the business?

I ran into some of these boutique type speakers many years ago. As I recall they all sounded pretty good they just seemed to my inexperienced at that stage ears to be not worth the money. The only one whose name I recall was the Linaeum Model 10 which I remember because they sounded so entrancingly good my wife actually was pushing me to buy them! Yeah. Imagine that. 

They were made in Portland not far from Seattle and so at one point when I drove them down for an upgrade wound up talking with the designer himself in his lab/studio aka the family basement. 

Those speakers were worth every penny. And then some. So I would not hesitate one millisecond to do that again- if I heard the same magic. That is always the key. Go and listen. 

I definitely think there are companies pricing their products so that very few will ever hear them and almost nobody will ever really get to know them.  There are reasons why prices need to be so high but they aren't performance related.  If every little piece requires a long expensive process and if a bunch of people die making every pair, you've got something that is unobtainable to the vast majority of people.  Talking points and exclusivity are what luxury is all about.  

Like anything it is a matter of capability, efficiency and money. In order to make any product inexpensively you need to invest in expensive machinery and you have to make a lot of copies to amortize the cost of all that machinery and labor over as many units as possible which means you also have to keep the price down so you can sell a lot of them. So jon is right. Who wants to be seen driving around in a Kia. The Rolls does a better job of telling people to get out of your way. You get there just the same. I'd rather get a 911 and just drive around everyone:)