The best speaker you ever heard?

How about "jump on Best Buy before they are gone"?

Radio Shack had a few gem audio products over teh years by most standards. That was a long time ago though. Still sad to see RS finally succumb to the times. If not for radio Shack and Lafayette as a kid, I don't know if I would have ever become as interested in this stuff. My first real johb was At Lafayette back in high school. I was on cloud nine. Then Radio Shack for a few years, before going to Grad school and eventually landing a real job. Those were good times!

MagicoM series or new Magico Q7 better than the Shack.

gato fm6 from Denmark. Giant killer. I heard Wilsons at 4 times the price
Then these. I had them shipped from Denmark through a dealer in the UK I was sold on them quick. Best treble ever. Shimmery metal vapor is what I call it. Open midrange and deep tight bass.

There are a lot of speakers that could be placed in this category. I have really been enjoying The Audio Note AN-E lately. They have very organic musical sound , especially with tube amps

for fun and curiosity, i wrote a script to parse every post in this thread and the "speakers to hold on to for life" thread and then compare it to a list of brands i put together (sorry if i missed any important ones) to see how many times each brand was mentioned

obviously, there are a lot of flaws with such a method (same person mentioning the brand more than once, mentioning the brand negatively, brands that aren't as well known or mass produced, etc) and i'm not going to go as far as to run sentiment analysis on the output, but i did a few spot checks and i think it gives a pretty good idea of general audiogon thoughts on speaker brands

sorted by # of times mentioned, descending:

brand, # of times mentioned

magnepan|magneplanar|maggie|magnapan 148
wilson 145
b&w|bowers 139
quad 136
atc 128
apogee 103
proac 102
vandersteen 97
martin logan 84
sonus faber 71
klipsch 65
jbl 62
dynaudio 61
thiel 51
kef 51
avalon 49
focal 42
revel 41
schweikert 37
tidal 36
tannoy 32
merlin 28
altec 28
coincident 27
harbeth 26
paradigm 25
totem 20
linn 19
hale 19
aerial 19
tyler 18
shadorne 18
dali 17
snell 15
gallo 12
shahinian 8
devore 6
wharfedale 5
amphion 3
odyssey 1
gemme 1