Best Loudspeakers for Rich Timbre?

Speakers don't do math. Nor are they polymaths given the numbers of instruments, materials, musicians, tuning, styles, etc. etc. in existence.

Yes it's fair to say that all speakers must either be adding or subtracting to timbre

Timbre is the human (expert) perception of the sound of a note made by a specific (tuned) instrument, brought into existence by a musician.

Instrument. Musician. Human Perception of Sound. Note: No speakers involved.

From this point on, there is a very long chain which attempts to provide a 'facsimile' of that note. What you are hearing in your listening chair has to do with that entire chain.

We could have stopped right there. 😄

All the best,
Nonoise

@nonoise ,  I agree that valve amplifiers can add to our perception of harmonics/instrument timbres, but to keep it simple I wanted to concentrate on loudspeakers only.

I hope you can agree that we've had plenty of good suggestions worth exploring if anyone is interested in this all too often neglected topic. 

All of the following suggestions are of potential interest to anyone looking for above average reproduction of timbre - 

Devore Fidelity 0/96 and 0/93 
Sonus Faber 
+Franco Serblin's Ktema or Accordo
Audio Note 
Daedalus Audio 
Tannoy DCs
BBC Harbeth, Spendor, Graham
Vienna Acoustics
ProAc
Legacy Audio Aeris / Focus SE

and Joseph Audio speakers got a special mention too.

cd318,

Interesting list.

The main problem I see is the subjectivity involved.   If we surveyed everyone here we'd see a huge variety of speakers being used, and I doubt many people would say "My speakers don't do instrumental timbre well."  In other words, that list could be expanded to the point it's not terribly useful.

That's not to say that I think that it's just entirely subjective whether a system produces accurate timbre, or accurate sound in general.  In principle, it seems to me, blind tests could be set up with, say, live vs reproduced sound and a large enough sample size of participants, and tests, over time could produce results showing some speakers produce sound closer to indistinguishable from live (and hence good timbre) than others.

But as that isn't happening much at all, we are left to what measurements can tell us, and ultimately our own impressions.

cd318,
I wasn't implying that tube gear would help in getting rich timbre. I was agreeing that the whole chain of gear must be taken into consideration. 

You can swap out speakers until you run out of patience and won't get rich timbre if what is upstream of it is not up to par. If you can get as accurate as you can a set up, rich timbre should be one of the results.

All the best,
Nonoise

@prof , yes live v recorded demos would be a great way to show off loudspeakers.

Gilbert Briggs (Wharfedale) used to do this back in the 1950s in absolutely huge arenas like London's Festival Hall.

Surely someone big like B&W could do something similar now.