What's your favorite boutique speaker maker

@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 ). 

@hilde45 Thank-you. You got it, and no disrespect to the many wonderful designers of old and today. They are dedicated, hard-working people trying their best (for the most part) to produce superb products that are both accurate and able to be sold to customers who own infinite configurations of hardware in infinite rooms, so a tough job, obviously. An anechoic chamber is a nice place to check your product, but no one has one in their home.

My preference for Magnepan products comes from owning a shop and having the unique opportunity to listen to pretty much every popular speaker for extended periods of time (years) with pretty much every high-end product available to drive them. Given this opportunity, I was AMAZED at how bad my judgement was at the time. Even though I played in bands, I was not aware of the sound of the band to the audience (this was before cordless instrument electronics so I could not wander out 30 feet from the band and listen to the noise!).

Once we brought instruments--electric, brass, percussion, etc.--into the shop and played them live while/before/after listening to the recordings, we learned a lot about not only recording engineering but also spatial dynamics, microphones, mixing, etc.

The bottom line is that, while there were some real jokes--Bose 901, for example--and real popular if pretty bad ones--large Advent’s--the ONLY box we found even close to accurate was designed and built by Bob Fulton. Nothing against Mr. Kloss--a true pioneer and super guy--but other than the Fulton box, every other box and electrostatic speaker sounded artificial when compared to the Magnepans.

Lesson learned. Today, many new engineers and inventors are making very good box speakers, and they sell quite well to discerning customers. That is great, IMO. However, I have yet to find anything that is as transparent as Magnepans, which, when set up correctly, reproduce what you send them, thus revealing the quality of the electronics, recording, etc.

Finally, and yes, a bit snarky, I find it interesting that almost all the "better" speakers today are about 6’ high. Wonder where they got THAT idea, eh?

Cheers!

Locally a pair of John Kalinowski built KCS backloaded horn speakers powered with 98dB sensitivity Fostex FE206ES-R Limited Edition 8" drivers are for sale. Is anyone familiar with this creator and what should I expect from this set? I’m more than curious and assume these would be considered boutique since they are custom or one off made...My current reference system is Monitor Audio Gold floor speakers (Ribbon Tweeter) that I find absolutely amazing, powered by Oulaw audio monoblocks and a Anthem AVM 60. So not quite audiophile grade but maybe a step above consumer level. I have been researching Klipsch and the horn sound probably led me to these.

SALK Audio makes the best speakers for the money  Paradigm also makes some really good sounding speakers.

My favorite is Sound Labs ESL. They are the most beautiful sounding speakers I have heard and has  great customer service.