Speakers with imaging "Free of the box"

I concur with Bdgregory's mention of Totem Acoustic loudspeakers regarding "transparency". I am running Forest's myself. As others have said, the whole audio hardware chain absolutely affects the final result - not to mention recording quality. From the responses, there's a lot of other good sounding stuff out there to consider.

I think the most interesting phenomenon I enjoy is when a musical entity is recorded hard left or right and still the sound seems to come from somewhere external to the drivers or the speaker itself. I find this to be true with Kharmas (and before this with Apogee Stages). Do other speakers out there do this? [By the way, I also will add my thanks to Mikelavigne for all the great, insightful posts of his over the years. I always look forward to them.]

The DCM TFE200's has some of the best stereo image that I have ever heard.... www.dcmspeakers.com

04-20-07: Rgs92
I think the most interesting phenomenon I enjoy is when a musical entity is recorded hard left or right and still the sound seems to come from somewhere external to the drivers or the speaker itself.

That's along the lines of what I'm interested in. Not just an excellent stereo image, but an image that's "free of the box" even when the sound is panned hard left or hard right.

Surprised no one has mentioned the Ushers. I have a pair of 6381's which do a very nice disappearing act even in my compromised HT set-up and less then ideal listening room.

I've owned many speakers over the past 30 years and know of none that are a better value than the Usher 6 series (especially on the used market).

They will compete and any many cases, destroy many speakers costing "much" more. They are as transparent, if not more so, then the Maggie 1.6's I owned which were also very good in this area.