Speakers 10 years old or older that can compete with todays best,

To be honest, mot people have not maxed out the potential of their systems.  The components most people use are inferior to what they can be using to improve the sound in their systems.  We get to hear some many systems and components weekly and people are amazed when the hear our products and what their components sound like once we upgrade them.  So IMO the limiting factor is the components uses.  Our Class A mono block amplifiers were recently paired with a pair of Sonus Faber Stradivari Homage speakers.  This is a guy who works for an audio store so he has access to many components.  He purchased the mono blocks.  The sound coming out of the speakers completely changed to his preference.

You have to keep trying and learning what makes sound do what it does,

Happy Listening.

Ten years is a “bump in the road” especially for speakers. I wouldn’t have my qualms of putting any ten year old speaker up against new ones. The only issue with older speakers might be capacitors, but in ten years that’s probably wouldn’t be an issue. Also, a lot of older speakers are better made construction wise than more recent ones. All in all, I think this comparison is a non issue.

I am running Tidal Contriva Diacera SE speakers. They are 10+ years old, I have owned them for about 7 months.

Amazing, hard to imagine there is better available.

And they are beautiful!

@jasonbourne71 @scm

I wish I’d kept my DCM time windows! They were my first real speakers. Got them in 1992 from an engineer that had refurbished them and drove them with an old high current Kenwood integrated. Had them for almost 20 years and sold them.

would love to get another pair just to recreate that feeling I got when I first had them.

@mikelavigne ,

There is no such thing as a perfect room. There is also no such thing as a perfect loudspeaker and there is certainly no such thing as a perfect analog crossover.

Each one of your speakers has its own amplitude curve and they are not the same, even if your room is perfectly symmetrical. This leads to smearing of the image. The secret is getting the two channels within 1 dB or better from 100 Hz to 12kHz.

You can use much steeper orders without any distortion in the digital realm and you can perfectly align all the drivers in phase and time regardless of where you place them. 

In short, your speaker plus the DEQX will be way more accurate than any speaker these people can come up with. That sir is an absolute fact. I spent decades on your side of the fence. The single greatest development in HiFi since the advent of the KLH Model 3 is digital signal processing. The Pre 8 is currently the best processor available. It has a 64 bit floating point system and will stay above 192/24 regardless of anything it does. What is the difference? It is like trying to compare a good direct to disc record and a good studio record. 

But, stay on your side of the fence. Instead of knowing you have the best possible system, waste time and money searching for something better. That search will never end. That question mark will drive you crazy.