Speakers to hang on to for LIFE

Still love my B&W Matrix 802 series 3 I think Ill Hang on to them for a long time. Best Ive heard, And Im in an Audio club on Long Island where the median system is 30-75$K They hold there own. Also still have my Polk monitor10's in my BR for the second system those are Lifers. 15 yrs old now, as good as new, in looks and sound.

Another Quad esl57 owner here. 8 years, and 3 pairs do i own. only avantgarde trios have matched them so far, and thats an amazing comparison. have mine in a 12'x12' room at the moment!!!! still sound great. Rolling stones on now, cant always get what you want, but you get what you NEED yah

Spendor BC-1s purchased in 1979.
The most tonally accurate speakers I've heard. Other speakers have come and gone. Some I still have. Some rock more. Some do this or that better. But none sound as much like live music as Spendor.

I just replaced my merlin 1B+'s that were purchased new in 1987. the speaker cloth had oxidized so I stripped them down to the bare sonotube material which made them look worse but they still sounded mighty fine. I caught the upgrade bug in '87 and bought a B&K st140 power amp, superphon revelation preamp, ar turntable and the merlins. my previous system was klipsch and harmon kardon which at the time I thought was pretty decent. I heard a pretenders album on a similarly priced system as my merlins/power amp pre amp combo and I could hear chrissy hynde actually breathe while singing and the rest is history. I lived happily with the merlins for 19 years and thought I had the bomb budget high end system of all time. I still use the amp/pre amp purchased in '87 and in december 2005 I bought a cambridge audio cd player, all new interconnects, b&w 603's and new speaker cables. the b&w's look like fine furniture but the merlin's served me well through college and way beyond. bravo merlin international!

The only speakers worth owning are those that are accurate in reproducing the original signal fed them.

And that means only Thiel or Vandersteen. ALL others are NOT accurate and LOSE much of that information by losing harmonics that are contained in the TIMBRE of instruments.

I don't care what you spend, it does not matter in the least. There are only these two manufacturers and that is it.

Stereophile promotes speakers that are INACCURATE. Thos e that have the mid driver inverted phase wise are FOOLING themselves and EVERYONE else. You CANNOT invert the harmonic content of the timbre of instruments and expect them to ve accurate. And eveyone's EARS can hear this!

All those mentioned above except for these two makers of speakers, and those who think they are hearing good, accurate sound, are sorely mislead in this hobby.

Why any of you would want a speaker that doesn't replicate accurately the signal coming from your upstream components is completely beyond me, but then it's YOUR money and EARS.

Nuff said.