Hales Transcendence 5 speakers endgame?

I suppose one man’s endgame is another man’s entry level.

I don’t know what SOTA stands for but in any case I would imagine that audio speaker technology would not have changed that much in the past 20 years. I could be wrong but the tweeters and midrange drivers in my Hales are still current and available in outfits like Madisound. I changed out my tweeters for Seas Millennium which match the midrange drivers which come with the Hales. I don’t know if the woofers are still available but I bought a pair of spare woofers years ago just in case. I also redid my crossovers with better quality parts and rewired them as well. I think my Hales are keepers.

I love my Hales. They are the one component I will keep. I just had them refurbished and tested and although I told the technician I hired to refurbish my speakers that I was willing to spend up to $8000 to super mod them he recommended to match them as close as possible but that they were pretty close to maxed out already with the Seas Millennium tweeters and redone crossovers. He showed me the graphs of the speakers after the work and they are very close to each other. The problem was actually a poorly wired woofer which was throwing off the sound so he rewired and repaired the woofers and now the speakers measure very close to each other. 

The internal cables were  upgraded to Cardas Litz when I redid the crossovers and replaced the tweeters with Seas Millennium tweeters. As I listen to them now I prefer them to my Focal Utopia and Audeze LCD4 headphones with Moon 430ha headphone amp. The speakers are nice.

I just got my Hales T5’s back from repair and tuning and they measure very well. More to the point they sound awesome. They are the only component I didn’t upgrade. The Hales are definitely keepers.