Most agreed upon best speaker?

Ok Atmasphere,
Most horn devotees snarl when we mere mortals speak of 'horn sound' or 'horn artifacts', as if that phenom doesn't exist. I'm not sure that I do either, but they definitely have their own 'flavor'.
You say that these have the same imaging and detail as the SL's, wow, that's saying something. The Sound Labs, even to most who don't like 'stats, are still revered. They are virtually colorless and VERY, to my ear, lifelike, both texturally and tonally. Low level res is rediculously good.
And as I've said, I have an enormous listening room which they filled with no problem whatsoever.
How much are these jewels?

Stats are indeed very lifelike texturally and tonally, but not, alas, dynamically (at all), and so they leave me bored.

(Now I'll probably get some real enemies.)

Paul, have you heard the Sound Labs in a serious audition?

But, I've never heard a horn sound quite right,(to my ears obviously) in terms of just raw staging.
What is it that I'm missing? And which horns can and do stage accurately?

Perhaps it is the narrow dispersion pattern that gets you. To produce convincing sound that feels real for the room you are in it helps to have wider dispersion and EVEN dispersion (no discontinuity in beam width between drivers at the crossover). Not all horns are narrow. Not all designs suffer from abrupt changes in beam width. Some Westlake's and JBL's are wider dispersion - particularly the big bad 4 or 5 ways. Many of the modern horn designs have wider dispersion these days.

Lrsky, I know what you mean about the Sound Labs- I've heard them many times as I have lots of customers and friends who have them or had them. The detail and cohesive quality that ESLs are capable of on a day to day basis is something that usually leave magnetic loudspeakers in the dust.

Until field coils re-emerged. Field coils were common in the old days until sometime in the 1950s- permanent magnets are cheaper to produce. It seems to be the curse of audio that there is a movement always to the bottom, but in high end we are concerned more with performance, so it is only natural that field coils would show up again.

I think the Classic Audio Loudspeakers, fully equipped with field coils top to bottom, are in the +$50K range. The field coils seem to have the property of doubling the cost of the speakers, which are also available with alnico magnets.