I much prefer having of one pair of large speakers than having three pairs of small ones lols.
Anyway, coming from DIY world, listening to a lot of speakers does change your perspectives. I used to watch Siskel and Ebert when I was a kid and found it strange they all hated Top Gun criticizing how vapid the shallow the plot was lols. But now thinking about it, being a movie critic, they probably have watched hundreds of movies more than the average folks lols. Now having watched tons of movies myself, I rarely go to the movie anymore because I can't stand most of them. Once in awhile a perfect one comes along but that's far and few in between.
Anyway, as for speakers, after listening to quite a few, I am rarely impressed by speakers that can do super detail sound, a soundstage that you can peer into every nooks and corners of the recordings, and having a leading edge that can peel off the skin of an apple and after doing quite a few speaker projects, I guess the reason is those are fairly easy to achieve. Too many designers treat a speaker design project like a science project and missing the point. Ironically, only those that made the mistake in the past and even more rarely only those few that actually understand the science behind speaker design, that finally has decided to abandon the science (or at least most of it), and concentrate on the other side of things.
I got nothing against science though because if I were to lead a software design project, of course I'll be like treating the science like a bible ... hahaha lols.
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