Best bookshelf speakers <$2000

BTW I think it's good to go to stores and listen to a lot of offerings from a lot of mainstream manufacturers but I do not subscribe to the notion that big corporations = big R&D budgets = better speakers - quite the opposite in my experience. The vast majority of my favorite speakers of all time have been made by smaller outfits. While the big boys do have the manufacturing capability to design and produce their own drivers, most of them are doing the vast majority of it in China, IMO with the aim of making things that look and sound cool on paper (magnesium alloy! diamond coatings! unobtanium coils!) while keeping costs low. The truth is some of the best sounding drivers in the world are still made out of very traditional materials using decades-old technology. I mean, look at what Wilson is using in their latest models - that's right, treated paper. (I'm not even a Wilson fan but I think their newer stuff is sounding better for it.) The margins on mass market products are also much fatter in order to share enough of the pie with all the people involved - distributors, dealers, marketing and advertising agencies, etc. etc...

Just my $.02 but I'll take a finely crafted 2-way using off-the-shelf Dynaudio or Scanspeak drivers and a very simple but carefully-tuned crossover over some of the needlessly complicated mass-market designs any day. 

In all things, buy what you personally like. Pay money to make your family and yourself happy, not reviewers and not me.

I will say that hearing things for yourself is critical.

My goal in life is not to buy $3,000 bottle of wine. It is to spend $30 for one I like more, and I can't do that if I see price tags and market acceptance as the overriding marks of quality and performance.

Having said all this, there are store brands I like and direct brands I like. Fritz is one of the latter. If you talk the former, Monitor Audio, Magico and Focal are some of the brands I tend to like.

Above all, buy what you will love.

Best,
E

Audiotroy is exactly right. 

Take a speaker like the KEF LS50. If you're not making bass a major priority, that speaker represents overwhelming value. What direct-to-customer speaker maker is designing any of their products using computation fluid dynamics on super-computers with drivers tailored for the individual application? None. Companies like KEF, Focal, B&W, Paradigm, Magico, and others who operate vertically integrated businesses have tremendous engineering tools at their disposal. The kind of engineering they're capable of concentrating on a project IS the value you're buying, even if the actual cost to create the product isn't equivalent to some guy in a steel pole building scraping his concepts together using AutoCAD and some simulation software. It costs companies like Focal, B&W, and Magico next to nothing to implement nuanced alterations to the drivers to better optimize them for a specific application. Nobody buying drivers off the shelf is getting that kind of service from their supplier for a negligible cost. Wilson is known to buy incomplete drivers so that they can do those more nuanced modifications, and very few are going to that length. You look at a company like Tekton and they can't even promise you what components your crossover is going to be made out of! 

Being able to put your product physically into a market place is a significant accomplishment, and in this particular business, is required because of the nature of the product and business. These are luxury products and I think most of us are expecting a luxury buying experience. Ordering something on the internet with a generous return policy is NOT a luxury buying experience. Buying my Focals was, without a doubt, a luxury buying experience. 

Buchardt apparently took 5402 acoustic measurement points with a robotic nearfield scanner in making the waveguide for their new speakers, fwiw. 

I'm leery of marketing based on fancy sounding processes though. Isn't the ear the ultimate arbitrator of a speakers worth, not the cool technology that went into it? Since SQ is so subjective, it's easy for our impression to be moved by claims of fancy technology ie snake oil. That's not to say R&D doesn't matter (I'm no luddite), but the ends justify the means, not the other way around IMO. 

And at least judging by my research so far, a very good share of the most recommend SQ for buck speakers are smaller companies. Again admittedly second hand information, but these are other peoples ears and I don't see what bias they would have to favor these smaller brands a lot of the time.

As far as a luxury buying experience, that's not important to me. I want a low risk buying experience which to me means trying at home with the option of returning. Also a manufacturer who stands behind their product and I think small companies may tend to do that better in general (they have to to keep their heads above water).

But this is a tangent. I'm perfectly happy to buy from a large manufacturer if it seems like the best speaker for my preferences and dollar and I have  a way to try it.