DIY. Whose speakers would you use?

How about the Audio Note Speaker Kit 04 (AlNiCo). The cost is $7K but you can purchase the cabinet (unfinished) for $950 so for about $8K you can have a close proximity of their AN-E/SEC Silver except the kit has silver voice coils and AlNiCo magnets on both HF and LF drivers, and hemp cones on the woofers, but not the silver wire unless you add it. So the kit actually has the better drivers but lacks about a foot of silver hook up wire (just buy it yourself) and also lacks some of the better crossover components used on the higher end line. You could upgrade caps but you still wouldn't have the silver inductors, which they do not offer with the kits.

Although they say the kit has "precisely matched and calibrated crossovers" they also compare their kits with their regular line (and justify the higher price of the regular line) by saying;

It is important to appreciate that a finished AN-E is always likely to be better that any equivalent kit version, no matter which one, as the drivers we use in the kits have a slightly wider "spread" in performance than the ones used in the finished products, basically the kits get the drivers which cannot be matched within the very tight criteria used in our finished products.
Also we do not spend anywhere near the amount of time setting up the Kit speaker's driver/crossover matching, we allow a tolerance on the finished products of 0.2dB plus or minus, in the kits this is increased to 0.6dB plus or minus, mind you this is still several dB better than anything done by other manufacturers, but it is audible in the overall performance of the speakers, if you do a direct comparison on very good equipment. This and the fact that it is necessary to rematch the driver/crossovers to the actual cabinets when assembled to maintain the tightest possible match, this is not possible for any hobbyist building a kit and means that a kit can never get close to the consistency of a finished product.

Seems if someone wanted the sound and efficiency of an Audio Note speaker, you could do quite well for about $8K with the all-out kit and their own cabinet, plus add about a foot of silver wire per cabinet and maybe upgrade some of the x-over parts like changing the caps to their AN Copper or Silver foil paper in oil caps. Your end result should (in theory) sound simlar (or better than) to their $20K plus speakers for less than half the cost.

Orpheus 10, I have heard the Polk's are good sounding speakers for the money. So are Paradigm and others.

The Audio Note kit is primarily for those wanting to use relatively low power tube amps, or maybe low power SS Class A amps, so a different market.

Regarding quality, you should check out the website and detailed manual and build link. These kits are already designed and, if you purchase their cabinets (a no-brainer for $950) then all you have to do is assemble - much different than starting from scratch.
Audio Note Speaker Kit 4

BTW - have you ever looked inside of a manufactured speaker, just parts and wires, cabinet work and maybe some damping material. Other than a few who use high end cabinet materials like Wilson, Hanson, and some others, most are rather ordinary. In addition to using high quality drivers and parts, what makes a good speaker is the crossover/driver/cabinet design, and component matching, all of which are already done with the Audio Note kit. In this case, the kit would be an alternative for those considering purchasing one of their very similar manufactured products costing double or more.