How do you know what a good speaker is?

Folks who like live modern rock music should take an SPL meter next time you go to a concert in a smaller venue and see how loud it gets. To recreate a similar experience on home audio equipment will require a system that can handle unrealistic SPL levels without either blowing speaker drivers - mostly due to inadequate power, or sound extremely compressed. Other genres are different with exception of certain western classical content and some instruments within that content and during short transients. So the notion of comparing live music with home recreation of that same musical experience is not always a good baseline for evaluation.

@bdp24 Agree completely. I probably should not have said how the engineer/producer "intended" it to sound. As you say, I think there are many legendary engineers who do have a very specific intent but even they don’t know when, where or how we will be listening to the music. I suspect most of the rest of the producers/engineers out there are just getting product out the door and/or dealing with budget and time limitations.

"I guarantee you most commercial recordings are NOT made to sound "accurate", but rather "good".

Agreed. That’s why I don’t think looking for accuracy is the best way to evaluate a speaker. There are usually too many variables and too much variance in production. I guess is all you listened to was classical piano and you knew which producers tried hardest for accuracy then that might be something to seek after but that would be a very narrow measure of a speaker intended for broader use.

And maybe what makes a good speaker should be defined as a speaker one likes.

But I will say this, the more I listen and the more I think about SQ the more I realize that for me it comes down to two big things. And oddly, sound stage isn’t one of them. The first is what I’d call separation or distinction between instruments, voices, etc and the second is sharp, tight, distinct, well defined bass. And then it comes to what I don’t like and that is overly bright high frequencies. Maybe fourth comes soundstage and as long as it isn’t one dimensional I’m happy with that.

Studio monitors rarely make good pleasure listening speakers, and if they do, they're probably not very good monitors. How long a speaker is made doesn't have much to do with anything either. Bose made 901s for eons and those sound like garbage. And what about the ESS AMT1? Those things came out in 1975 and they're still making them. Is that thing better that the many iterations of the Wilson W/P? 

As for reproducing the live sound at home, you're doing it all wrong if you're going to your local HiFi shop. You should be going to Thunder Audio and buying some Milo cabs and a couple of 650HP subs. No consumer speaker comes close to creating the SPL that a Meyer rig does. 

It’s easier for me than many others, as my main criteria when evaluating a speaker is of it’s ability to make singing voices and acoustic instruments sound as timbrally-lifelike and coloration-free as possible. Non-Classical acoustic music is performed at modest SPL, so extreme capability in that regard is not necessary (though nice to have when I have a cravin’ for AC/DC ;-). The bottom note of a standard 4-string bass (both electric and acoustic upright) is located at 41-42Hz, so the 20-40Hz octave is not an absolute requirement. But an 88-key piano extends considerably below 40Hz, a pipe organ (heard in much of the J.S. Bach I love) down to 16Hz! Bass is expensive, but we no longer need rely on loudspeakers to provide that; there are some great music subs available now.