Affordable vs. ultra expensive speakers - what's the difference?

Go listen and answer the question yourself.

The $50k speakers will melt your dennon receiver.

It is true that speakers must be commensurate and synergetically linked to the room...

But is is not enough at all...

A room must be treated materially but this  is not enough also...

A room must be mechanically controlled...

After a rightful acoustic embeddings the price of speakers dont means much pass a certain price of the basic components...

Acoustic rule not the box....

An acoustically  dedicated room beat any piece of gear in improvement at any price...

I bit went from what was a perfect $5500 pair of speaker and spent $12500.00 more for the 5’s and well regretted it. They just did not work in my room.

Higher price is no guarantee of better sound, which is subjective anyway, but higher cost from the builder’s perspective allows for more expensive, higher quality, more resolving, and hopefully better sounding parts. It’s still a huge challenge to synergize all the parts into a coherent, balanced, and satisfying speaker. Then there’s the critical element of finding components that will reveal the better parts of the more expensive speaker. Throwing Magico, Wilson, or Focal speakers on an generic 50 watt receiver isn’t likely to impress anyone.

What’s the difference? Just in terms of manufacturing and parts quality there’s a huge difference. Aluminum enclosure, drivers made from billet aluminum, substantially better crossover components. Is it “worth” a $47,000 difference, or does it “sound” $47,000 better? I have absolutely no clue but there is big money in making the expensive example you reference.