What Speaker are Great for Rock and Roll $5K-20K

Rock deserves the best to reproduce it, just as other kinds of music. There are plenty of excellent sound engineers working in the business.
Excuse me, but I like Jimi, Janis, and "the Boys" to sound just as life-like as Callas, Tebaldi, and di Stefano. Eric's guitar should sound different from Buchanan's and Beck's (Jeff, for chrissakes). Fidelity is fidelity...no matter what you're listening to. If it's poorly recorded, turn it down. If you buy a colored system, you're penalizing yourself from enjoying the best recordings of the best artists. I don't detect a whiff of...snobbery here, do I?

The main point...you dont need to spend a truckload of money for very good sound...especially for rock...

No, PC, that is NOT the point, at all. Rock is as demanding, and as deserving, of excellent reproduction as any genre of music. One may not appreciate Gregorian chant, for instance, but to those that do, the best sound quality means very much, indeed.

Specific types of "rock" music are FAR more demanding to reproduce than any other type of music. The amps are required to generate a far higher average power level and the speakers are required to dissipate that power. Obviously, using more efficient speakers can help reduce the strain on the amps, which also lessens the power that the speakers have to absorb.

One of the owner's manual for some speakers that i own talks about this stating something to the effect of most music requiring less than 5 watts rms to attain "realistic" listening levels with reasonably efficient speakers being used. They also go on to state that rock music may easily require 10 times that amount of power on an average basis. As such, they caution you to be careful when "jamming" for extended periods of time and start talking about such things as "duty cycle", thermal overload, etc... For the record, the manuals that come with these speakers are 48 pages long !!!

Besides power output and handling requirements, there are no other types of music that cover as wide of a frequency range. Due to electronic keyboards and computer sound generation, some recordings contain MASSIVE amounts of very deep bass while at the same time, include quite a bit of extreme treble. All of this can be taking place at the same time at very great amplitude and intensity. While it is true that some jazz and a bit of blues makes use of "keyboard wizardry", none of that music is played with the same intensity or volume that one typically associates with "live" rock reproduction.

Having said all of that, i think that the most important factors when building a "rock" based music reproduction system boils down to the ability to generate sustained SPL levels and cover the entire audible frequency range without going into compression at any point in time. If you can do that and throw in a good amount of detail, clarity and some form of soundstage with good left to right separation, most "rockers" would be overjoyed. Then again, what my idea of what is "rock" and what you consider to be "rock" might be very different things. Same goes for what is considered "loud". Obviously, there are a LOT of variables involved in different perspectives and what one likes / dislikes and desires out of a music reproduction system. Sean
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Again Sean another brilliant post. You hit the nail on the head. "Sustained SPL's without compression".
I heard Rush at the United Center in Chicago about a month ago. Damn they rock!!!!
The only way to really reproduce that experience is to generate the SPL's I experienced at that time. For me, that involves driving my speakers with my 380 watt/channel amp almost clipping.