Best small speakers?

I just spent the last two hours listening to Billie Holliday on the speakers that replaced my wonderful Magnepan 1.6 QR pair. The Maggies were on Mye stands and fed by Rogue and Odyssey gear...terrific sound and image and amazingly transparent with a lot of watts. Good lord this Verve CD of Holliday is also amazing!
Now those big Maggie panels are replaced with fairly small Merlin TSM-MXrs and fed by 18 watts from a Manley Stingray. It's been a very nice upgrade for me. And it's a lot easier to move the Merlins when needed.
No doubt a lot of people will chime in and some very good speakers will be mentioned. Sadly....it's not easy to audition Merlins, but if you can you may find the magic you need.

Rob

If 5K is your budget the Wilson Benesch ARC. I had them with the Rogue gear. Terrific speaker, extrememly well made with fine fit and finish, coherent but detailed

Why settle for small speakers that have higher distortion
mid Bass thump and bright highs when driven to their limit...
Take a listen to Full Range like a Vandy Quatro still a smaller profile or Five A both offer room compensation will never overload your room and deliver more seamless enjoyable music.
Best JohnnyR

Audience, made in Southern California are terrific.
Huge, open sound.....when I walked into the demo room, I thought the big-brother line source speakers were playing.
These are full-range multi-driver speakers with a passive radiator.
And for the full pop of $5k, really nice. Model? 2+2

http://www.audience-av.com/images/ClairAudient_2.jpg

Harmonic Precision Caravelles; They blow away every monitor mentioned so far and with a good, musical sub, unbelievable. Too bad employee theft destroyed the company and builder. Check out the pair for sale on audiogon now and my review I wrote comparing to my MAXX 1's.