I haven't looked at Stereophile in years--and seeing what comes up about them I'm not missing much. I thought their definition of Class A was "state-of-the-art." Class A restricted LF meant that definition minus that last octave of bass. I'd give those speakers a high strong C+. I'm not saying they suck, but they're not state-of-the-art when there's $1,600 ribbon drivers (Raven R-3) out there and lots of $500 tweeters (Scanspeak Ring Radiator, Focal TLR, Dynaudio Esotar, etc) that when well designed into a system can deliver the goods. I agree with alot of SDcampbells statements. You can do some good stuff with cheaper drivers, but you can't make'em outperform better drivers that were executed into the design with equal attention to detail.
To answer your question "but I wonder if speakers are getting much better for the money"
They're getting better, but the expensive ones should be getting better too, so the entire bar is constantly higher than it was 5 years ago. Stereophile is just stupid. Isn't even the Avalon Eidiolon using a $200 Accuton tweet, which is better than any of those speakers. Scan-speak Revelator at $220 is another good one.
To answer your question "but I wonder if speakers are getting much better for the money"
They're getting better, but the expensive ones should be getting better too, so the entire bar is constantly higher than it was 5 years ago. Stereophile is just stupid. Isn't even the Avalon Eidiolon using a $200 Accuton tweet, which is better than any of those speakers. Scan-speak Revelator at $220 is another good one.