The best speaker you ever heard?

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

I'm a super music lover, although I love all kinds of music no matter what it is, I can only afford a pair of Wharfedale Denton 80th Anniversary Limited Edition in walnut color and gorgeous retro look, the cabinet, the grill, and the bookshelf size just matter to me very much, and the sound definitely enough musical for me, though certainly it has limitations like dynamic and cannot go extreme loud without distortions, but it relieve me with less fatigue laid back sound. In near future, I'll look for near to full range bookshelf speakers, still I prefer something small and sound elegantly, my ultimate aim is to hear no distortions when volume reach the level my ears cannot take it, that's the next limit I need to aim for.

By the way, anybody own the Wharfedale Airdale Classic Heritage? Any thoughs on how it sound like? I think my ultimate dream is to own a pair of those, sitting in my room and accompany me till the end of my life!

Just think, those Dentons are better speakers than 90% of people had 20-30 years ago !
But if you REALLY love music you better take it easy on the
volume or you won't be hearing much at the end of your life .

Schubert: Thanks for the advice, usually I will stay away from the speakers when crank volume to some extreme level, haha just to feel the awesome sonic energy. I think there are really a lot speakers that got extreme low distortions, unfortunately comes at high price, space, and complicated setup. I'm still looking for a pair of small and compact near full range bookshelf speakers...journey started all over again...