What is the best HEAVY METAL speaker?

Not sure why all the hating on metal, saying you should listen on a boombox, and only with 15" woofers. I'm a huge metalhead myself, mostly death and doom metal, and the music benefits just as substantially by quality gear as any other genre.

I have an Odyssey Lorelei speakers driven by a Pass Labs X150 and a Modwright LS100 Pre.

I do agree with Nrenter saying: "stay away from horn, electrostats and planers" I would look into some of the towers by Axiom audio or Revel, some of the best metal I've heard. Have you decided yet, or made a short list?

One of my best friends, Earl Root (RIP) pretty well founded the metal scene here in the Twin Cities. He turned me on to a lot of metal, some of it excellently recorded.

One thing that came out in spades is if a speaker is really good at classical music, it will be good with metal too. I use the Classic Audio Loudspeakers model T-3, which uses dual 15" woofers and a field-coil powered midrange horn with a real beryllium driver (no breakups in the audio passband- its very smooth and fast). It plays metal great- it can shake the building easily. And it plays classical great too- it can shake the building easily. But it plays delicacy as well. Fields of Nephilim never sounded so good.

Surprisingly, I am finding it difficult to find an excellent heavy metal speaker. There are a lot of great speakers out there, but so far I can’t find a speaker that has these qualities:
1(Fast deep Bass, however not too over powering or boomy
2)Treble smooth and accurate that defines the lead guitars accurately without a brash blur of distortion.
3)Treble that lays the drummers symbols on top nicely to the rest of rhythm
4)A midrange that gives the vocals a clean but not harsh edge.
5)Good separation of the different instruments playing in the music
6)Good live sound, if you know what I mean.

I am slowly picking through the different suggestions here on the form and I know there is a lot more than just the speakers to achieve good sounding system. I have been also playing around with my listing room acoustic and narrow down a better sound. I am enjoying my search though, lol.

Mikelavigne those speakers do look impressive!

Not my bag. but what about Cerwin-Vega?

Actually if you are on more of a budget, Audiokinesis makes excellent speakers that fulfill the requirements. The Classic Audio Loudspeaker I mentioned retails for about $33,000...

Something you also want to consider is the interface between the amp and speaker! To get best results, it cannot be an assumption that a large solid state amp will drive all loads properly. It will drive some, and others will be better driven by vacuum tube amps.