The best speaker you ever heard?

Bose? Really? Take it apart and see what you paid for. Gimmicky gadgets. It will never be a speaker audiophiles can take seriously. Hype is what you paid for. Simply put you can't polish a turd. I bet you run them with the Carver cube amps from the 1980's because they sold on hype and were such crap as well. Can you bi-wire them? Try lamp cord because all that fancy wire is just a waste of money too.

Revel Salon 2 driven with two Mark Levinsons in "compound biamp" mode. Even better than BOSE!!

So far the best I've heard were the Legacy Helix at the Legacy Audio showroom in Springfield, IL. Other contenders Magnepan Tympani IVs, MG 3.6s, Acoustat 2+2s, Snell Type As, and Legacy 20/20s. I look forward to hearing other contenders.

I'd be willing to bet, reading some polar opposite posts about "best" being low cost and weird speakers alike, that it was more about what was the best ROOM. In my world (recording/mastering studios), its ALL about the room. A mix can blow you away in the right room on cheap speakers, or 2 seconds later sound like crap on killer speakers in a bad room.

I remember Glenn Meadows at Masterphonics used to master using Yamaha NS10M's on Cello amplifiers. Sounded very good in his room! That speaker, widely used for mixing, sounds awful to me 99% of the time.

Brad

transaudio has a very good point. Bad equipment matching, bad room acoustics can make any good sounding loudspeaker bad irregardless of price. Acoustics in a room is very important, as important as the speaker design itself. All well designed loudspeakers however properly tuned and placed in the optimal acoustical environment with matching gear gives that audio nirvana feeling. There's always something in us that always wants us to push the envelope even though we might be satisfied with what we're hearing.