Most agreed upon best speaker?

Each upgrade of my gears made me happy since I could hear more and better sound, and the music sound more musical. I don't know when the series of upgrades would stop. It may never stop until I die or get broke.
It is hard to quantify how much someone loves music and/or sound, but to my wife I appear to be more of a sound lover than a music lover. Even though it upsets me to hear that, well, it is hard to dispute her judgment. I am writing this and listening to Wagner's Tirstan Und Isolde, and I feel short of SOUND from my system. Why don't I just enjoy the music as it is now and forget about upgrades!

"Why don't I just enjoy the music as it is now and forget about upgrades?"

Dammed if I know, but it seems to be a disease, some sort of a masculine thing, that all audiophiles suffer from, at least to some degree.

FWIW, at least it worked for me, I made a point about becoming informed about the music I was playing as well as the performance, etc, - then, when my potential critics arrived and started to launch an attact, ala your wife's, where I could dazzle them with knowledge, they would feel inadequate about their own music knowledge, and leave my obsessions alone. Works for guests as well, just don't try it on a musicologist!

And the side benefit - In the process of acquiring all of this knowledge I acutally enhanced my own enjoyment of the music in the process. Go figure. :-)

Lrsky, would you come over and sign my abdomen?

Newbee, the idea that a certain age of music recordings is designed to sound right on a certain vintage of speaker and amplification is a red herring. Often recording engineers, just like today, are recording on location and using headphones. Mic placement theory has not changed in the last 40 years.

Any engineer worth his salt knows that the monitors in the studio are not telling the truth, and that the recording will have to be heard on several different systems, and that it will have to sound right on all of them. That has also been universally acknowledged since the 1950s.

Your descriptions of the Telarc are spot on though. And a lot of the re-issues. I think you are hearing things right.

I recall the dynamics are what made the early Telarc digital recordings, like the well known Shaw/Firebird recording, special at the time, but in hindsight today, many other aspects, like detail, were lacking. Things have improved greatly with digital mostly since then.