What is your speaker ownership history since 1995?

Wow, bsimpson's list actually makes me feel sane ;-)

My audiophile genes were formed listening to my Dad's Kef 105 speakers with a Carver Sonic Holography amp, in the 80's.

Mine, since mid 90's (and I'm going to include speakers that, even if I didn't end up owning, spent months in my system):

Thiel 02 monitors
Quad ESL 63
Quad ESL 63 w Gradient Subwoofers
Von Schweikert VR 4 Gen 2
Shun Mook Bella Voce
Waveform Mach Solo
Audio Physic Libra
Thiel CS6
Hales Transcendence 5
Meadowlark Blue Heron
Meadowlark Swallow
Hales Transcendence T1 monitors
Audio Physic Scorpio
Waveform Mach MC monitors
MBL radialstrahler 121
Thiel CS 3.7
Harbeth Super HL5 Plus
Thiel 2.7

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Currently own:

Hales Transcendence L/C/R speakers (mostly use them for home theater now).
Waveform Mach MC monitors
Thiel 02 (too wonderful to ever let them go).
MBL radialstrahler 121
Thiel 3.7
Thiel 2.7

This is quite interesting seeing how various people progressed from one speaker to another.  So many questions arise "why did you ditch that speaker for the next one?"

It also tends to underline the cliche that we audiophiles can never be happy with what we have (for too long).  I will never believe any audiophile who, upon purchasing a new pair of speakers,  says "This is it, I've found THE ONE for me!"    That's what we all tend to think at first, but give it a year, or two, or whatever, and we are getting the itch again.

gryphongryph,

"Sorry, not to judge,..."

...is almost always followed by judgement...and a lecture ;-)

We are audiophiles. The gear is part of the hobby. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be here (including you).

Men (it seems more than women) are often into "how things work," with a fascination for engineering, how things work, how to improve them etc.Guys fix cars, collect watches, and are in to the mechanics and theory in all manner of hobbies. Why would you think the technical aspect of sound reproduction wouldn’t be a source of fascination as well?

I’ve tried speakers representing many different engineering approaches to reproducing sound: planar, dynamic, time-coherent, non-time-coherent, narrow baffle, wide baffle, dead-braced cabinets, "live" cabinets, omni-directional, etc. (And I own many of those different designs right now). The engineering aspect is fascinating - that is after all why many speaker designers get into speaker design in the first place! (Or other aspects of audio engineering).

As it happens, I’m a music omnivore and want my music to be reproduced in the most compelling way I can find. But, the huge variety of approaches one can sample in reproduced sound is also fascinating in of itself.  I have more than one speaker because my music sounds different through each of them and sometimes I feel like enjoying one type of presentation over another.  If I didn't care about such differences, I'd just own a bose wave radio or whatever is convenient.

I don’t see any reason to begrudge someone who loves audio gear, and buys numerous different components, than I would begrudge a car, or watch lover who has the means to explore numerous options that may float their boat.

I just thought I'd raise another analogy:

Guitars.

Notice that quite a number of guitarists (when they have the means) like to collect different guitars.  Why would they do that?  After all, if they were only "into the music" then guitar music could be played on any single guitar.

Except, guitars sound different.

And guitarists enjoy those sonic differences, so they collect different guitars that produce different sounds.

Same for audio gear.

One could say "but the objective of hi end audio is different: the objective is to NOT sound different, but to get out of the way sonically so you hear the precise choices the artist made.  Two different objectives."

Except there does not seem to be a perfect audio system of this sort.  (At least yet). And so we are left with audio systems that seem to reproduce different aspects of sound with different sets of strengths.  Given this variety, sampling different systems with different sonic attributes is enjoyable, just like collecting guitars that will sound different when playing the same song.