Most forgiving high end speaker 10k-20k?

It's not a question of speakers making mediocre recordings sound good, as much as making mediocre recordings sound their best. There is a lot of equipment that makes mediocre recordigns sound worse by compounding the problems, while making good recordings sound artificially more detailed than they really are by boosting highs and cutting lows. This gear will ultimately become unbearable on the good recordings too when the thrill of false detail wears off.

Most people don't know what the TRUTH sounds like in a recording because they weren't there when it was recorded and played back in the studio. Some believe that if your ears don't bleed while playing a mediocre recording then you are not hearing the truth, but simply masking its warts. While there is some truth to this it is not completely accurate. I have heard some expensive speakers which sound highly resolving, but only because they don't seem to properly reproduce all of the complex harmonic structure in the recording, and thus sound thin, giving a false impression that they are more accurate. At some point during my speaker search I realized that NO speaker completely tells the truth. Every speaker and component in your system lies at some level. Once I accepted that fact I stopped chasing the "most accurate" speaker and changed to the speaker which gave me the "most satisfaction". Granted, that turned out to be a fairly well resolving speaker, but one which is also able to not drive me out of the room on lesser quality recordings. I suspect that you too can find a well resolving speaker which can also play mediocre material, but the sad truth is (IME) you must compromise somewhere between the two. Hopefully you can satisfy both types of recordings, squeezing out enough resolution with well recorded material, yet still achieve at least acceptable playback with lesser recordings.

If you did get the worlds most forgiving speakers they would probably put you right to sleep.

I have been in love with the Wilson Benesch Curves for about 8 years now. They do everything you are asking about. Extraordinary on good and great source material.
Wilson Benesch has a new speaker out called the Vectors that I recently added to my show room floor. Amazing.

Check them out.

The best
Jim

Making bad recordings sound good may not be all bad. In the case of open baffle speakers it is adding back the ambiance that is missing. Live music is usually listenable even though the artists aren’t great performers. A lot of that enjoyment is from the ambient sound that is missing on most speakers. Including ambiance is a valid approach.

Bob

This discussion has reminded me of how glad I am to have tone controls. (Go ahead, barbecue me!) I listen almost exclusively to classical music, and I seek out recordings for the music and the performance, not so much for the sound. Unfortunately, when you take this approach, you get quite a few poor recordings. My pet peeve is screeching violins. (Please, no system recommendations; good recordings DO sound good.) When things get too bright, I just dial in the tone controls.

It's not an ideal fix, because most treble controls are centered on about 10K Hz, while I believe the actual region of violin brightness is quite a bit lower, probably about 2K to 5K Hz. (That's why I wish they still made presence controls to cut back a little in this region.)

I know folks talk about all the bad things tone controls are supposed to do, but I've never heard them. I think, when needed, they fix far more problems than they might possibly cause.
-Bob