The best speaker you ever heard?

Ctsooner, I have a solution to your problem with Magico speakers...try auditioning them with more emotional upstream gear like CJ Art/Gat or Vitus Sig Series and KS Emotion/Elation or Siltech Royal Sig series cables ;). Btw, the Magico S5's are both time and phase coherent according to Magico. And to my ears they are very coherent, well balanced and non-fatiguing which suggests their claim is true.

I agree 100% with your comments about audiophiles relying on notoriously sub-optimal show conditions to form a view about loudspeakers. That's why I am reserving my judgment on the Vandy 7's as I haven't heard them in a dedicated room, though anecdotally they can have boomy bass and an issue with sound stage height (depending on the room). Whilst the Vandys are known to have a narrow sweet spot (not that that's necessarily a bad thing. It depends on how you listen). My point being, with work and perseverance it is possible to make the 7's sound wonderful...in the same way as the S5's ;).

Mattmiller, I had all Cello components back then but not speakers. I agree with Roxy54, that my Cello amps nothing near that wattage. It was outstanding but the equalizer and fiddling with it drove me crazy. I put it all up for sale and had five buyers in 15 minutes. I sold it to the firstguy.

Tbg,
Weren't the speakers called Grand Stradivari? The amps were called Performance I think, but there were bigger and smaller ones.

Cello's Performance mono amps (sometimes called the Red Eyes because of their red light in the front panel) put out 350 watts, I believe. Perhaps Mattmiller heard a system using multiple Performance amps; I seem to recall hearing something like that at Gene Pope's studio (Pope Music, which made some excellent CDs) in northern NJ years ago at an NJAS meeting.

Bodhi, I heard them with tube gear at Overture. My buddy has the Q5's and uses all AR Ref gear and I just haven't connected to them. That's just me. I don't connect with most speakers out there. I listen for different things than many do. I have a local dealer who was carrying them years ago when they first started out and I didn't get them back then either, but again, I have plenty of friends who swear by them. That's nothing negative against them at all, just me. It's a nice looking and well built speaker. There were many parts of them that I liked a lot, but I had no connection and haven't with any of their models I've heard at dealers like Overture as well as friends houses over the years. Please don't take my post as a negative against Magico. They are highly accurate and I have found that's the part that most of the phase coherent speakers all seem to have. I have sat and listened to the highest end Wilson speakers over the years and I don't get them either, however they are very popular with many audiophiles. Nothing against them, just not for me.

Many don't get the Vandersteen line either and that's all good too. Those of us who do love them, seem to hear the same things. I like to sit and get moved. My Ayre Twenty gear is neither tubed nor SS in sound. To me (and many other's) they sound correct. I love many tube electronics and have owned CJ, AR, CAT, Quick over the years and have even wanted Jadis for the longest time, but now I only have SS other than my Aesthetix Rhea phono stage and eventually I"ll sell that and get a balanced SS phono pre as I run only balanced into my amps.

That's what makes audio so much fun.