Experienced audiophiles best speaker

What do you mean by 'real time'? Hours- days- weeks, years?

The closest you will get is to go to RMAF (for a few years) and decide that for yourself, there simply cannot be that many folks who have had the time, or money, or inclination to have heard it all (and also be good listeners with critical faculties), in their home, with their electronics, etc. And then good luck trying to find any "authoritative" conclusion - it's just not like that. It gets all the more complicated when you take into account that the speaker is a very different creature depending on the amplifier and source driving it, let alone the room. And then, at the end of the day, if all that were possible, you would only know what that one person thought was best for them.

Pubul57....

That last sentence is "spot on",Imo.

I'll admit that first impressions are important- you know immediately when a speaker sounds good if its in a good setup. But you have to live with a speaker to really understand its virtues with different types of music. A 'lively' speaker can eventually become fatiguing, and a more neutral design might be preferable over the long haul. I also think that speaker (and amplifier) evaluation is highly dependent on music type- for example, some speaker designs that excel with symphonic music simply fail with heavy metal, and vice versa.

We're not talking about absolute truth here, since the definition of great audiophile sound varies. That's why these opinions always need to be qualified. And its always nice to know the opinion of those who are really well-informed.

Not sure about this, but I think if a speaker could do symphonic music right, it will get heavy metal right, you really have to do an awful lot well in a speaker to get symphonic music right, including scale and dynamics. There are certainly speakers that are great for solo acoustic singer type music that can't quite get symphonic music right since so much more is demanded to reproduce a real symphonic presence. If you can do Mahler, I think you can do Metallica IMHO.

Just an observation, I think you can really screw up a great speaker when you try to make it produce real bass below 35hz or so, that insistence on the lowest bass really challenge a speaker, an amp, and a room. A long time ago I decide I was willing to give up that bottom octave to have a speaker that was "the best" for me. But then again, I don't listen to alot of symphonic or heavy metal:)