Best Loudspeakers for Rich Timbre?


I realise that the music industry seems to care less and less about timbre, see
https://youtu.be/oVME_l4IwII

But for me, without timbre music reproduction can be compared to food which lacks flavour or a modern movie with washed out colours. Occasionally interesting, but rarely engaging.

So my question is, what are your loudspeaker candidates if you are looking for a 'Technicolor' sound?

I know many use tube amps solely for this aim, but perhaps they are a subject deserving an entirely separate discussion.
cd318
schubert,

"Rich timbre" is not a description I personally would give the Totem line.
I've always found they had a superficially attractive sound - those sparkly highs allied to a deeper coloured midrange, but their completely obvious contouring of the frequency response for that "Totem sound" is just too obvious and intrusive for me to enjoy over  time.   There's an obvious dip in the upper frequencies that gives it a recessed sound and but comes back out still in the presence region to give the impression of sparkly, sharp transients.   But it results in a pinched sound to the upper mids.   I think it's probably that dip around 5K in the crossover region that you see over and over in measurements of Totem speakers.



It seems to me that Wilson speakers have for a while now entered a bit of a renaissance in terms of the feelings they engender in the high end community.   It used to be that Wilson was everyone's favourite whipping boy - that paradigm of the "really expensive heavily constructed high end speaker" that had tons of hype, and which some reviewers lauded, but which many people loved to hate "way to clinical, way too bright, way to colored, etc."

But these days Wilsons seem to get way more love, and words like "rich" and "realistic, natural" seem to accompany reviews and reports on many of their current models.  And they seem back in favour even with reviewers who may have abandoned them once before. 

These are all observations from a distance, as I haven't spent much time (if any) listening to a Wilson speaker for many years.
I admit that I have enjoyed some recordings on Wilson speakers, but generally the smaller speakers sounded better.  I've heard big Wilson's from the start decades ago (abysmal) which sounded like 5 boxes of sound, incoherent music.  The Sabrina, Alexa were the most recent ones I heard and they sounded good with massive tube power amps (VTLs).  I prefer more efficient speakers.  

As to Magico, that's where I've heard truly bad sounds.  Their Q1 playing Scheherazade sounded about the size of a boombox (not much bigger).  I heard the S5 make a guitar sound like a ukelele.  I've heard the Q5 sound dark and minimally dynamic with Jadis gear.  Otherwise, the better Magico systems I've heard were meh, not musically interesting.  

The worst was bringing my wife to her first audio show.  She walked out of every Magico system saying that they're uninteresting.  She loved the Ultra 11 vonSchweikert.  We both loved the Lumenwhite, the Stein audio, Volti and Marten speaker systems.  She liked the Harbeth 40.2 a lot.  So, these speakers were especially good at presenting a musical/warm sounding tone. 

Some people love Magicos and Wilsons.  I've never heard the Magicos sound tonally interesting.  Smaller Wilsons, better.
I would . My Totem Sig 1’s cross at 2.7 and sound very close to what I hear and have heard in over 2 thousand live classical concerts . Very coherent and consistent from 50 to 18.000 hz .