Alternatives to Dunlavy speakers?

I think Richard Hardesty does an excellent job of describing Dunlavy's, Thiels and Vandersteen's in his online magazine "The Audioperfectionist." He goes into great detail about these different speakers and comes to a conclusion based on his experiences. He ultimately chose Vandersteen and tells exactly why. I too agree with his conclusions. Vandersteen's test as good as any speaker, they are time and phase aligned and are constructed of the finest drivers and parts. I have tried a lot of speakers over the years and the Vandersteen 3A Signatures and the Model 5's are a couple of the best available.
Everybody has a favorite sound or a favorite speaker. Look at all the people who like Electrostatics. Talking about test results, find one of these that is any where near flat over their range but it doesn't stop people from liking them.
I think it's best we not try to convince someone else that because we like a speaker that it is the best and everyone will love it because that is certainly not going to be the case. Each person can go out and do their own investigation. Read, read and read some more and then create you a list and head on out for the day. I, in the past, have bought speakers on Audiogon and turned around and sold them a month later. It was the only way I could get to listen to them. It afforded me the chance to listen to speakers that no local dealers have in my room.

9rw- The test spec sheet proves nothing which is why I was making the reference to the audiom TLR tweeters(retail on the tweeters alone was $2400 for the pair, so they were pretty serious car speakers- but any ways) spec sheet, frequency response is going to be SOOOOOO different from room to room and for that matter from car to car, they have other ways of testing tonal accuracy and linear excursion but again even that is still pretty pointless. I am not saying these are bad speakers, not in any way just not the last word in performance- to my ears. Happy listening everyone.

I agree with the Thiel/Vandersteen/Dynaudio recommendations, all excellent choices. My personal preference is Dynaudio, as I find the Thiels too bright and the Vandys too warm, but system matching is important as always. Re Dunlavy, IMO most people place far too little importance on time and phase coherence. Dunlavy didn't do everything perfectly, but he was on the right track, no doubt about it.

To Audioguy -

Thanks for the additional information on the Montana's.

It is my understanding that the XP uses first order filters everywhere except on the tweeter, which uses a third order high pass. I don't know about the crossovers in the rest of the Montana line.

Just for the record, John Dunlavy's negative characterizations of vented enclosures do not apply to all vented alignments. Along the same lines, if I were to characterize all sealed boxes based on the transient performance of a Qtc = 1.2 alignment it wouldn't be a fair generalization. There are vented alignments that exhibit superb transient response, comparable to that of a critically damped (Qtc = .5) sealed box. In my opinion, Dunlavy's stance on the innate superiority of sealed boxes is a bit dogmatic. I say this as a moderately experienced amateur speaker designer and builder (over 55 systems including sealed, vented, passive radiator, isobarik, pressure relief, transmission line, and dipole. I'm currently working on three systems: a dynamic dipole; a transmission line variant; and a well-damped, ultra-slow-rolloff vented alignment).

Piega 10's are more tranparent and revealing than the IV,IVA,and the V's which I've had in my system for 5 years plus. The Dunlavy's have a bigger soundstage and must be played at higher levels. The music got to be fatigueing after long periods of play. The difference that appealed to me was in the bass. The Dunlavy's had a huge but boomy bass while the piega's was tight fast and deep. If you have the space you may want to hear the Soundlabs also.