Best way to A/B speakers......

With all due respect, you have just come upon the leading edge of a very steep learning curve. The reason you can't tell the differences is because you have not established a frame of reference.

To use the automobile analogy, On Monday you drive a Porche, on Tuesday you drive a Mercedes, on Wednesday you drive a Cadillac, on Thursday you drive a Mazda. You (probably) can easily retain knowledge of these experiences even though the cars are different in most all respects and demos are days apart. You not only retain the experience of the individual performances and the differences between them but you assign a value to them.

Probably not so with audio. You probably have never heard what a good system sounds like in an audiophile's home and/or you have never visited a dealer show room where time an effort has been expended to proper set up a system. Most dealers who are trying to sell good speakers will not use an A/B switcher because each speaker has seperate needs to sound good, including selection of the amplifier, as well as room set up. So, in that respect you have no goal. With out such a frame of reference, you could go into a store which utilizes a speaker switcher like your car audio store, hear two terrible speakers, and buy the best and assume you had good speakers. You could hear a very good speaker not properly set up and driven and it could sound like crap.

There is no quick fix for this problem. What I would do is get the assistance of some audiophiles in selecting a system which will sound the way you think you want it to sound (by telling them what aspects of sound are important to you in response to thier questions) and setting a budget to work in. DON'T just go into a store an buy the best speakers (according to your ears) that you can afford and take them home and expect them to sound great. It ain't going to happen unless you have a habbit of winning lotteries.

FWIW.

Thomas, What ever you do don't underestimate the impact of properly setting up speakers in your room. A long and often tedious task. You mention Dali's and Maggies. I can't imagine two speaker types with more obvious differences in set up and amplyfing requiremnets. Proper attention to set up an room acoustics can get some excellent sound from speakers that some might consider uninteresting. FWIW.

Thomas, Re your question about set up - If you are talking about setting up the Maggies you would want to set them up so the back wave would hit a wall behind it, something you could control the acoustic nature of, and you would want them, ideally to be 5' from the wall. The wall's surface would be ideally broken up with diffusing materiels, There are all kinds of tricks with panels that will work - one thing I have done is to set the speakers up close enuf to a side wall that so with a bit of toe in the back wave hit the side wall and then hit the wall behind the speaker. Just something to remember and try if you.

Setting up front firing box speakers in front of the open space could work, but I still like them in front of a wall with the open space behind me for a couple of reasons. One is that the open space breaks up the reflection from the side walls (which would hit a solid wall otherwise and give you reflections from an additional surface) and could result in a cleaner sound.

Re the room with the side walls and pitched ceiling. If you set that room up, and you could, I would have to set the room up so that the speakers fired down the lenght of the pitched ceiling - you do not want to fire into the sloping sides. Also, if you want to maximize imaging potential, you would want to be sure that the speakers were set up so that the middle was directly under the center of the pitched ceiling and your chair also. That way reflections off the cieling would be identical and not screw up the sound stage. BTW, I suspect I would not really enjoy panels in that room, but you can try if you've got'em and see what happens.