Best speaker brands for transient response

@goofyfoot thank you for the recommendation on the Quads. The ESL models are out of my price range but I've had a look at the Revela 2 and it is in my range and has been very well reviewed in the limited reviews out there. Music Direct is a dealer for them in the city. And yes I don't have a very big room to work with which does exclude some otherwise good options.

 

And I assure you, a Magnepan, either a .7 or a 1.7 or ANY Magnepan (and these models are far under $10k) don’t have an iota of distortion in the bass.

I’ve owned both the 1.7is and .7s. 

I’ve also auditioned the 3 and 20 series Maggies. They have better bass than most pistonic-cone speakers, especially when driven with high power, massive current reserve amps. That said, I’ve encountered quite a few speakers that I feel have better controlled bass with more realistic definition—less distortion I would say. For example, Børresen X series and Philharmonic BMR Towers both have considerably better defined bass than did my recently departed .7s. Those speakers are 5X and 2.5X the price of the .7s respectively, so it’s not terribly surprising that they’d have better bass.

Some other aforementioned speakers also have subjectively faster bass than the Maggies, though nothing I’ve heard under $15K/pair begins to match the Børresens. 

Magnepan sells a bass-only speaker, DWM, crossed over at 200Hz, but flat to nearly 5KHz. I use two to augment my pairs of 2805’s and 2905’s.’They are a push-pull design and are very fast.

I eagerly look forward to the dipole dynamic woofer system Magnepan has been working on for quite some time now. It is said to be the basis for a new Magnepan planar-magnetic model, and to be offered as an add-on for the already available Magnepan models.