I tend to agree with the posters above who stated that musicality, or drawing them into the music, or forgetting that there are any speakers playing. Those are the most important things, IMO. Those are what listeners are wanting.
The other attributes could be considered "parts" of the whole, and are mainly aspects that the designer and manufacturer should be concerned with. Of course they are important, but mainly to the designers.
I think the reasons that many people pick out parts of the presentation and look for those attributes is that no speakers are perfect, and since compromises are certainly going to be made, they don't want to make them in those key areas of concern.
Ultimately, in my opinion, a speaker(or system in general) must present a somewhat believable and engaging quality that conveys the emotional content of the music in ways that the composers and players intended to convey via the musical performance.
Since the emotional content of music is largely conveyed by dynamic contrasts, and believability is conveyed largely by coherent presentation, with correct tone, and fine detail, I think that a speaker with speed, excellent micro and macro dynamic ability, and a phase-coherent character with good tone is most important to me. Of course, a reasonable amount of frequency range must be covered. Other aspects may be very important, but would rank below these things that I mention first. In other words, I wouldn't sacrifice any of these aspects in order to gain deeper bass extension, or higher max SPL, or whatever. By no means do I intend to say that any part of a speaker's job is not important.
Another thing that must be considered is that speakers do not operate alone, and need to be matched to amplifiers and rooms that can work best with them to exploit the best characteristics.
And of course, they can do nothing that is not originated at the front end of the system. Whatever musical information doesn't get into the system, can never make it out of the speakers. So a quality front end is critical to get the best from your speakers.
The final frontier seems to be resonance control in the system. Speakers, as the actual sound generating transducers in the system, cannot be isolated from themselves. They must be held perfectly rigid to eliminate doppler effects, especially on the tweeter. This eliminates any rubbery substance as a possibility. Any improvement in resonance control in speakers must consist of removing unwanted vibrations from the speaker system. The best way of doing this is via a sophisticated high-speed resonance evacuation route that is designed with resonance transfer as a goal. Not just a hodge-podge thing that LOOKS like one of those engineered systems. Reducing Coulomb's Friction in the resonance transfer path is the way to speed up this evacuation of unwanted resonance and remove it from the speaker so that sound improves without damping out part of the live dynamics, and keeping additional doppler effects out of the equation.
The other attributes could be considered "parts" of the whole, and are mainly aspects that the designer and manufacturer should be concerned with. Of course they are important, but mainly to the designers.
I think the reasons that many people pick out parts of the presentation and look for those attributes is that no speakers are perfect, and since compromises are certainly going to be made, they don't want to make them in those key areas of concern.
Ultimately, in my opinion, a speaker(or system in general) must present a somewhat believable and engaging quality that conveys the emotional content of the music in ways that the composers and players intended to convey via the musical performance.
Since the emotional content of music is largely conveyed by dynamic contrasts, and believability is conveyed largely by coherent presentation, with correct tone, and fine detail, I think that a speaker with speed, excellent micro and macro dynamic ability, and a phase-coherent character with good tone is most important to me. Of course, a reasonable amount of frequency range must be covered. Other aspects may be very important, but would rank below these things that I mention first. In other words, I wouldn't sacrifice any of these aspects in order to gain deeper bass extension, or higher max SPL, or whatever. By no means do I intend to say that any part of a speaker's job is not important.
Another thing that must be considered is that speakers do not operate alone, and need to be matched to amplifiers and rooms that can work best with them to exploit the best characteristics.
And of course, they can do nothing that is not originated at the front end of the system. Whatever musical information doesn't get into the system, can never make it out of the speakers. So a quality front end is critical to get the best from your speakers.
The final frontier seems to be resonance control in the system. Speakers, as the actual sound generating transducers in the system, cannot be isolated from themselves. They must be held perfectly rigid to eliminate doppler effects, especially on the tweeter. This eliminates any rubbery substance as a possibility. Any improvement in resonance control in speakers must consist of removing unwanted vibrations from the speaker system. The best way of doing this is via a sophisticated high-speed resonance evacuation route that is designed with resonance transfer as a goal. Not just a hodge-podge thing that LOOKS like one of those engineered systems. Reducing Coulomb's Friction in the resonance transfer path is the way to speed up this evacuation of unwanted resonance and remove it from the speaker so that sound improves without damping out part of the live dynamics, and keeping additional doppler effects out of the equation.