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

Von Schweikert VR 4 HSE - still sound wonderful. I gave them to my son so I have a chance to listen when I visit him. I always thought they were equal to or better than the Wilson Maxx especially considering the price difference. 

Great post and totally agree! I currently have Revel Performa F228Be. They are breathtaking. But honestly, nothing I've heard or have owned since back in 2001 has come close to Dynaudio Audience 82's. I had to sell my entire rig after my divorce in 2004 and have since gotten back into the game. I started with Dynaudio (started with Emit, then Excite, then Evoke), yet none of them gave me the same magic that Audience did. Evoke came the closest. I finally heard Revel and my ears decided that was the direction to go. But Audience 82 were just pure magical. No other way to describe them...I'll always miss and remember them. They were the first speakers that truly "disappeared". I'll never ever forget that first moment I sat down for that first critical listen at homer after running them in for 1 week....WOW...wow....Have had many amazing moments in my second go round, but never had that "wow" moment like I did with my Audience 82's...

I've had really good systems and when times were tough, a boom box. The best system I had back in the 70's was a Setton preamp and power amp PS5500 with built in fader mixer & BS5500, a dual mono block, with LR power switches. A pair of ESS AMT 1's, Teac R/R, Sharp Cassette deck with auto search stop & play, and an SL1200 with an AT Shibata stylus. The ESS were ahead of their time and no longer in business today, but their AMT tweeter is being used in many of today's high-end speakers after their patten timed out. Really miss those speakers. Today I have a Pr of Wilson Sabrina's that image like a Mo Fo in 3D sound being driven by a pr of PS Audio Steller M1200's. It's my last system, a Simaudio Moon 350P, PS Audio M1200s, Parasound JC3 Jr, VPI Aries TT w/ Hanna ML low, OPPO BDP-105, Schitt Audio Bitfrost 2/64, Lokius 6 band EQ, Wilson Audio Sabrinas, and an SVS Ultra 16 Subwoofer. I find buying used gets a greater system for the money than new.

@mijostyn wrote:

And just how are you correcting amplitude 1 Hz at a time? It is not down the road for me. You can do it in an automated fashion or manually including programing delays. I start with automated then fine tune manually. I find it best to program for flat then overlay my own preference target curves which were constructed by ear. 

Depends on what's being addressed. Are we speaking notch placement or PEQ? Notches in the HF-region are located precisely with nearfield measurements, whereas PEQ's can be more of an assessment by ear from the listening position (in addition to measurements), starting out "overshooting" in larger Hz-steps (and gain ditto) to get an overall bearing, and then fine tuning in ever smaller increments and Q-width variations.  

Efficiency is nice if you want to use small amplifiers. Personally, I do not care about it. I prefer to look at the type of loudspeaker.

It's a common misconception I find think to exclusively link up high efficiency with small amps as the preferable scenario. High eff. speakers + high power amps can be great solution as well - why limit yourself to one approach, and from what, experience? I too look a the type of speakers, which is really about what that dictates sonically rather than eff. per se. 

You like horns, I prefer ESLs which admittedly are not efficient @ 86 dB. But, since I remove 100 Hz down from them they go louder than ---- , which is all I really care about, the ability of a system to reach realistic volume levels.

With horns and large displacement dynamic drivers it's about that as well, but then it's about how realistic volume levels are reproduced rather than merely attaining them. 

At any rate with the amps we have today efficiency is not an issue.

If that was the case it's assuming the amp is the only determining factor in achieving realistic volume levels and overall effortless reproduction, which clearly it isn't. Low eff. speakers will eventually compress both as a dynamic phenomena (as in transiently fairly early on, dulling transient behavior) or more outwardly as a macro-thermally induced ditto heating up the voice coil to such a degree that SPL is reduced from an expected value. 

It only determines volume per watt and not sound quality.  

As an outset, yes, but practically it's not that simple. High vs. low efficiency isn't an all things being equal scenario as there are many differing factors at play comparing the two segments of speakers that will shape the outcome one or the other way. For one, with high eff. and maintaining extension into LF-region comes very large size, and controlling directivity into the lower mids will have the same consequence for the horn size here. The dispersive nature makes a big difference sonically, and high eff. + deep extension is a different meal/animal vs. low eff. and the same. A good quality, high eff. large format comp. driver + large horn combo simply steamrolls over a direct radiating low eff. dynamic driver combo in ways that has to be heard to be understood, whereas a large ESL speaker will have other qualities to bring to the table that in some ways exceed horns, while in others they fall short. 

@phusis 

I never said to limit yourself to one approach. But what you hear repeatedly is that people get high efficiency loudspeakers to support low powered amps that are deemed to sound better. That is not my experience, but that is why Howard Johnsons made 28 flavors. Also many classic speakers were very high efficiency because the amps they had back then were not very big. Efficiency was a big deal, back then, unfortunately time alignment was not. Also nobody took sub bass seriously. It was not until the late 70's that subwoofers creeped into the situation and due to the lack of adequate bass management were endlessly belittled to the extent that many audiophiles will not go near them even today.    

As far a digital EQ is concerned, it is not parametric EQ in the traditional sense, you draw target curves on a grid and the computer will apply them assuming the curve does not go outside boundaries. Once the system is flat down to 18 Hz I apply a rather standard target curve that increases bass up to 10 dB at 18 Hz, is back down to 0 dB by 100 Hz then tapers off slowly from 1000 Hz on up to 20 kHz which is down 9 dB. This allows stress free listening at high volumes giving the feeling of a live performance at volumes that are not destructive to iones hearing. I have one curve aside that has a notch filter at 3500 Hz in case I encounter a sibilant female or violin. I have not used it in over a year. It seems that the AtmaSphere MA2s have abolished sibilance in my system.