What's your favorite boutique speaker maker

ostinatospeaker: Are you the "refugee from the corporate world"? lol
Best of luck with your new venture, hopefully years from now your name will be on a list like this. 

Personal progression to a boutique speaker? I've had the big names my whole life, B&W, Kef etc. and just wanted something different and unique. Speakers are truly a part of the room's decor and yes of course they've got to sound great but I was simply ready for that something special aesthetically. 

Sonner Audio.  Fantastic speakers.  To my ears, his standmount Allegro was the best in show at the NY Audio Show a couple years back.  Gunny is also a great guy.

+1 @douglas_schroeder , @jriggy 
The word "boutique" has a pretty standard meaning which may or may not align with high quality. Like the local one-of-a-kind restaurant in your neighborhood, it may or may not be good, but it is not mass-production, mass-market. Caveat emptor still applies, and the same criteria for decent sound (whatever those are for you) still apply.

As for this one:

Magnepan makes actual speakers

It's not a bad slogan, except for what it implies about everyone else.

Legacy Audio and Spatial. The Legacy and Spatial rooms took took me by surprise at AXPONA.

@ostinatospeakers
My purchasing history spans Bose, Totem, and Janszen speakers. Clearly, Bose is mass market. I don't consider Totem "boutique", even though you'll never see a Totem Acoustics shoppe next to Bose in your local factory outlet mall. 

To buy Janszen loudspeakers, there is no dealer network. You call owner/CEO David Janszen. With the Valentina model, you choose active vs. passive, ash/cherry/walnut/maple/painted baffles, standard or custom painted finish for the surrounds, carpet spikes/rubber/other feet, Cardas (4-way, no bananas) vs. 5-way binding posts, dual/bi-wire bindings. When I mentioned my concern about cats using the front panel as a scratching post. David suggested maybe they could come up with a cat-resistant grill material.  You can pay by credit card or else get a discount for direct-wire to the company account. 

Then, you wait. For me the build process took almost a month. They've sold about 40 pairs of the model I ordered in the year or so since they came out. AFAIK their hybrid electrostatic speaker design is almost unique. It derives from a patent by Arthur Janszen (David's father) in the mid-1950s. Both the bass and the tweeters are tunable using controls on the backs of the speaker cabinets. After setup, I sent David a copy of my room-frequency response graphs (which already were about as close to flat from 20-15000 Hz as I've seen). He said they looked good, but suggested I should move the speakers closer to the front wall.

This is what I consider "boutique". Will the product necessarily sound better than an off-the-rack alternative? No (although every review I've read has raved about it ).