Speakers with imaging "Free of the box"

I have heard Wilson Watt/Puppies produce a huge soundstage with no clue as to their location. Years ago I also heard some Artemis EOS minimonitors that produced a soundstage as good as any I have heard.

Andy Payor's Rockport speakers with the right associated equipment, Crosby modified Quad 63's, Acapella Violins and Campanile's with very careful set up and Triolons. Also many small monitor speakers when placed out into the room.

I assume you mean they disappear. A mid and tweeter effect from reducing any edge diffraction that may localize the sound.

I find that tall narrow speakers (less than 8 inches), and small box designs (like satellites) often disappear most easily, as the edge diffraction in these designs become indistinguishable from the direct sound radiating from the driver.

I find that the big box speakers with large front baffles of a foot or more wide have a greater tendency to suffer from edge diffraction. Designers will usually offset the tweeter and mid range to one side to reduce the audibility of this. Triangular and odd shaped baffles also help in a similar way to offseting the drivers. Placing the tweeter or mid range on top in its own little mounting (like B&W) also helps.

Soffit mounting of big box speakers definitely has an audible improvement in completely "freeing the speaker from the box"; achieveing more solid and precise images between the speakers than freestanding. I have observed this myself.

Furthermore playing speakers without the grill can make matters worse, as the grill is often designed to help reduce edge diffraction artifacts.

Just my two cents... from the above you can usually make a good guess at how well a speaker will sound free of the box.

Quad ESL-57s "float" an image extremely well.

There are many speakers that can conjure images that are independent of themselves. There are both box and boxless designs that can do this very well in my experience. Certainly Quad, Martin-Logan and SoundLab electrostatics are proficient at this, as are the Magnepan and Eminent Technology planar magnetics. These designs seem to benefit from their boxlessness and their dipolar radiation pattern that cancels certain interactions with the room. However, these designs can sometimes produce images that appear less "solid". This kind of transparency of image can be distracting to some people, highly attractive to others. Omnidirectional speakers like the Ohm and MBL designs are fabulous at imaging, perhaps peerless. These are images that you can literally walk around due to the way in which the speakers propagate sound. The omnidirectional radiation pattern also allows you to enjoy extremely solid and convincing images from nearly any position in the room. I've heard very carefully designed box speakers from Totem, Von Schweikert, Kharma, Wilson, Avalon, Thiel, Vandersteen, and Aerial image as convincingly and independently from themselves. However, their power to image this well is more or less confined to a few positions in the room.