High value, giant killer speakers?

I'll tell anyone who will listen to check out Omega Speakers. Their 4.5 inch drivers have a quick and wide presentation and sound great with a sub. Their Alnico drivers have great tone and have a really compelling "layered" kind of sound. Plus, all of their speakers are pretty efficient. Totally worth checking out.

Well, it really is the combination of speaker, everything upstream and the room size/setup. Too many variables, hence the 9,359 suggestions here.
For what it’s worth I just bought a pair of Elac Uni-Fi UB5’s for my brother-in-law along with a new Parasound A23 amp, a used Para P5 pre-amp and a new pair of Polk Audio PSW505 subs (the P5 has dual sub outs with variable crossover). As a system they work quite well. It took some time to dial it in but it sounds quite impressive even without coming room treatment. He has an older Sony Blu-ray player as a CD source. It will improve over time but it is orders of magnitude better sound than he has EVER had before! The small Elacs are a good place to start.

I have Tekton Design OB Sigma hybrid open baffle speakers, Hsu Research 10" subs driven by both a vintage Ad Com 555II and Parasound A23’s in bridged mode driving the passive subs. I believe Tekton Design is another good value place to start in speakers. Andrew Jones (Elac) and Eric Alexander (Tekton) are doing very nice design work!

Actually  douglas_schroeder has a point.
Sometimes its more important to know what NOT to buy, than what to buy.
 How about starting a post about what speakers to stay away from?

I wanted to add that I recently purchased a used pair of Dynaudio 42's, and to me they sound pretty similiar (from what I remember) to the original cbm-170. I'd say the Ascend has less bass, a brighter tweeter and a more detailed midrange. The 42 in comparison has a thicker, darker midrange, more bass slam and a much better tweeter. Overall they are both ruthlessly revealing and sound fantastic with certain music, but too harsh on other music. Both are much differen't than a forgiving speaker like a psb.