Speaker recommendation thread (Organised by tiers of price)

One thing I learned from all this:  I need to start hanging out with @audiotroy ;)

@blindjim  great suggestion... maybe we make this thread a yearly one and each year we do a fresh list we ask the question, which speakers from prior list should stay on?

Anything thats not voted over will be deleted.

But as you know there are also older speakers that are long time favorites (like Salon 2) so the nice thing about just doing the list as is... you will be able to see all the people who like a certain speaker with all their names next to it... that kind of helps highlight certain speakers as crowd favorites.

Build LX521 from flat pack or go fancy with magiclx turnkey and get phenomenal sound. Just have a bigger room. Fully active. Soundstage is simply awesome.

Anyone not mentioning the Vandersteen VLR CTs for the $1-5K range are insane. These speakers are really special.

As much as I respect this idea, I don't think it's useful for any real-world applications. If I've learned anything concrete in all my years as an audiophile, it's that we all hear differently. We all have different rooms and partnering gear, so speaker recommendations based solely on a price range are useless, mostly.

Even the pro reviewer lists (Stereophile) are generally useless IME. There is a wide range of performance among the same "class" of speakers. For example, the "class B" Stirling Broadcast LS3/6 far surpasses the class B Monitor Audio Silver 8s in resolution, imaging, and overall musicality - so much so that I would have placed them at least two classes apart (I've owned both), even with my most modest partnering gear.

I recently preferred an old pair of New Large Advents to a brand-new pair of popular and highly-regarded $3K speakers (and by a wide margin). Similar Advents can be bought for $250 - $400 on fleaBay, so I guess you can add those to both the [under $1000] and [$1000 - $5000] lists.