Best speaker brands for transient response

@phusis thank you for that very helpful response.

Playing in much lower price points, there has been fairly consistent buyers remorse from Studio 590 owners that move up to the HDI series (I stress not all, for some they believe it was well worth it). That matters when the 590s went for $1k before recently being discontinued and the comparable HDI 3800 goes for $5,500 at full retail.

To me, based on what I do for a living, it just seems their product range isn't focused and they're giving away a lot on the lower end of their range. Maybe their home audio isn't where they make money and it's largely an R&D business. But it just bugs me.

@deep_333 @phusis -- I am curious, what is it about JBL that makes you not a fan?

Imo, home audio could learn a lot from a certain category of the pro audio space...like Levinson/Daniel Hertz tried to do more recently. For example, Meyer Sound and pro Yamaha (specific models),  Pro Pioneer/TAD (to some degree) spend a lot of time and energy in getting the phase characteristics, slope, etc correct  even in passive builds, which changes the whole design methodology. This tends to affect coherence, accuracy, spatial nuance etc when there is more than one speaker contributing to a soundfield. You are always listening to more than one speaker in a living space,  i.e., not sitting around with 1 speaker (mono) in an anechoic chamber with your head in a vise. Ever wonder why a huge Klipsch sits there like an incoherent sore thumb while a huge Meyer disappears like a piece of cake and sounds like you deployed some object based codec?

JBL PA plays loud and clean, good for the price..but, not as nuanced as above mentioned. Their engineers are not foolish, just a bit arrogant sometimes (think they already know everything, nothing more to learn). Home audio...Wilson, Faber, etc seem to be genuinely ignorant/unaware in their approach of above mentioned..

To be fair, the avg home audio enthusiast/audiophile is not that picky, but, a percentage of the pros or the ones who spend the big bucks (at the least) are extremely picky ...it's their livelihood. Look at the guys who do installations at the multi/multi million dollar grand acoustic halls, etc. It is a world that's not known to many.

The Spendor D7.2 are still very much in the running but they lack outrigger feet, and with two dogs and a cat that’s actually an important consideration. I do realize I can buy outriggers for them.

I am a longtime Spendor fan, but they have largely been employing the same drive unit technology for the last 10 years. They use what is essentially a $50 Seas Prestige tweeter in all their current speakers (the D series merely having a phase screen in front of the diaphragm). The original D7s were probably close to benchmark status for that price range 10 years ago, but other companies have since leap-frogged them considerably.

To my ears they don’t come very close to producing the perceived transients and tactility of many others currently around the $7K—$10K price range, not in the mids, treble, or bass.

I encourage you audition them for yourself because that is always the best approach, but buying them “blind” (or deaf rather) would be a mistake IMHO considering the other options now available on the market.

@helomech thank you for your feedback. They are the one brand that I can't find a Chicago-area dealer for (have Borresen and Marten dealers relatively close and ATC in the city, and Dynaudio up north) and agree that at that price level I need to do an audition, regardless of return policy.

The cheap 'pro audio' systems that I have heard are painfully awful. Here too, it seems like you get what you pay for. Sometimes. YMMV