Are these damned brands or not good speakers?

I ran into some of these boutique type speakers many years ago. As I recall they all sounded pretty good they just seemed to my inexperienced at that stage ears to be not worth the money. The only one whose name I recall was the Linaeum Model 10 which I remember because they sounded so entrancingly good my wife actually was pushing me to buy them! Yeah. Imagine that. 

They were made in Portland not far from Seattle and so at one point when I drove them down for an upgrade wound up talking with the designer himself in his lab/studio aka the family basement. 

Those speakers were worth every penny. And then some. So I would not hesitate one millisecond to do that again- if I heard the same magic. That is always the key. Go and listen. 

I definitely think there are companies pricing their products so that very few will ever hear them and almost nobody will ever really get to know them.  There are reasons why prices need to be so high but they aren't performance related.  If every little piece requires a long expensive process and if a bunch of people die making every pair, you've got something that is unobtainable to the vast majority of people.  Talking points and exclusivity are what luxury is all about.  

Like anything it is a matter of capability, efficiency and money. In order to make any product inexpensively you need to invest in expensive machinery and you have to make a lot of copies to amortize the cost of all that machinery and labor over as many units as possible which means you also have to keep the price down so you can sell a lot of them. So jon is right. Who wants to be seen driving around in a Kia. The Rolls does a better job of telling people to get out of your way. You get there just the same. I'd rather get a 911 and just drive around everyone:)

I heard the Lipinsky L 707 at a dealer in NYC. They were really good.

tomcy6

 Enjoyed being in business for about 15 years and really appreciated the support I received from those smaller companies I represented. I was living in Golden near Denver and would show every year at the RMAF. We had great show reports, really great. People in then industry would come to our room and literally use the sound as a way to check their own products. The RMAF was my only good source of advertising and when I moved to Washington state that became a much bigger challenge. Not much happening here. Lots of tech nerds with apple music and ear buds. 
It was fun however.. I will indulge myself and post below a few show reports, not sure what year they were. 

“Though I've heard the Wilson-Benesch Curve floorstanders many times before, I found that they sounded spectacularly good as driven by Kara Chaffee's amazing deHavilland tube electronics . Nothing I heard at RMAF, save perhaps for the far more expensive Vandersteen/ARC system, could touch this rig for sheer midrange purity, detail, three-dimensionality ." Chris Martens TAS on the 2009 show.

deHavilland/Kubala-Sosna/Esoteric/Sounds Real room. "Oddly enough, I believe last year, this room was my runner up. The sound was largely how I remember, but even better. I have my reasons for voting this room "the best" and here they are. It played music for me. Its presentation was very big and wide and spacious, yet intimate. It was as if the music was being played just for me. The timing and pace were right on as was the instrument and vocal definition. No, I don't think this system could fool you into believing that an entire orchestra was right in front of you, but then I didn't hear a single system at the show that could. The front-to-back and side-to-side special cues were intoxicating. At the core of the system are the deHavilland KE-50A monoblocks, which were driving Wilson Benesch Curves. The CD player was an Esoteric X-03SE and the preamp was a deHavilland Mercury III with all cables by Kubala-Sosna (which is new to me). The sound was so damn good I told Kara that if they had a turntable there, it might just push me over the edge. Seriously, as amazing as this system sounded, I wonder what level a solid analog front end would take it to. Here's the icing on the cake for the whole deal - the entire system's cost: $50k. $50k! A lot of dough? Yes. Yet for "Best of Show" at an audiophile event - 50 grand is nothing. Kudos to Kara Chaffee and company for setting up an amazing system with amazing components. The system just shined."