My friend has the Lii Audio silver 10s ($1200 the pair) and he says they measure and sound very flat (no lowther shout). You need to seriously burn these drivers in and you CANNOT listen to their binding posts.....remove the binding posts and hardwire your speaker wire to the voice coil wire....its like a completely different speaker.
Of course, the latest 8b would sound and measure way better than the original 8......but modding the heck out of them brings them to another whole level.
Here is another variety of what I described above about getting planar sound on the cheap. You get a Minidsp Flex (analog version)......use a Fossi amp for the woofs and an Aegir or other inxpensive tube amp or class D amp (another $100 Fossi, for instance)......You use 2 12 inch Beyma 12BR70 woofs ($160 each) on an open baffle and above it you mount 4 Parts express $60 planar drivers in series parallel (woofs in parallel). WE are talking 94db woofs and 94db line source here!!! The mini dsp is the xover, the preamp and the DAC all in one. With both 12 inch woofs being directly driven by an amp and with no inductors in series and with equalization, the bass would kill, (I mean slaughter) the ET speaker. You cross over around 400 hz to the mini line array planars and you will have sound so good you would die. You run your wires directly from the two amps to the drivers (voice coil wires on woofs). The minidsp ($500), wood ($300), wire ($300), 4 woofs ($700) and 8 planars ($550) would be around.$2500 with shipping....plus whatever amps you want (you probably already have an amp for the highs.....some or you have another amp laying around for the bass. I would lake this anyday over a stock 83db sensitive 8B. Of course, as I mentioned above a fully tweaked 8b with open baffle bi-amped speaker would be probably better (better planars?). Alternatively, you could use one 10 inch planar driver from Radian ($660 a pair).....these might be more transparent than the Parts express planars but probably have less horizontal dispersion and way less vertical dispersion. (If you sit in one spot then the Radians might be the ticket).