Most agreed upon best speaker?

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.

Atmasphere,
Just read about field coil technology. Everything old is new again.
This makes incredible sense to me.
Since loudspeakers are the greatest producers of distortion, essentially due to a lack of control over the moving mass--(over simplification but the basic idea is there), the field coil acts to virtually eliminate it with greater flux density, aka, magnetic strength. I know you know this, I only mention it to help others understand the basic principal. I know I was not aware of these beauties.
Wow, I'd love to hear these things. I'm not in the market at this moment, but, who knows.