The Salon’s are great speakers but they’re not the peak of the speaker designer’s art.
I don’t think that you can get the measure of a speaker at a show or dealer’s shop. I think you have to live with them for a while. Especially the ultra-high-end type. Your ears or brain have to adjust to them.
If someone like @mikelavigne is willing to put the money AND the time and effort into an ultra-high-end system, I think he can probably build one that sounds noticeably better than yours, no disrespect intended. Diminishing returns will surely also be noticeable, but if someone has the money and wants a system and room that’s the best he can buy, I don’t have a problem with that.
There seem to be a lot of posts on this forum that imply or state that high-end audio or some aspect of it is a scam or that everybody should listen to a system like the poster’s or at least one based on what the poster has found works for him. I think we all hear differently, have different tastes, have different listening rooms, have different budgets, different wives 😁, etc. and that is why we all have different systems.
I say live and let live, and that’s just my opinion.