State of the art speakers from yesteryear.

I had a pair of NS-10s. They were not what I would call one of the great speakers of yesteryear. Sure you don't mean the NS-1000s? THOSE were/are great. My parents still use theirs and they are wonderful.

I had a pair of NS-10s. They were not what I would call one of the great speakers of yesteryear.

Ahh, but did you ever try putting toilet paper tissue over the tweeter and hanging them from the ceiling with bungee cord?

That is the all important tweak/alteration that takes them over the hill ;-)

Shadorne,
Yeh, but you didn't ask if he uses inversion boots while listening, these little details get forgotten easily.

Here's a short list that fit my criteria, which is: pre-1980, well suited to a wide variety of music, works well in a domestic environment, and has a treble range that's smooth and well-dispersed enough to sound reasonably "modern", whatever that means. I also need to have spent some time with them personally . . .

AR-3
ESS AMT-1
AR-1 with ESS tweeter added (fairly common in these parts)
B&O Beovox 5700
JBL L212
Empire 9000M

All of the above have given me that impression of "Damn! Those things are HOW old???", and I could easily enjoy them as my only speakers . . . maybe with the exception of the Empires on aesthetic grounds. And a few that don't quite make the list:

Quads . . . I absolutely love them, they're wonderful. But play some rock or crank up some jazz, and they sound like somebody brought a Jaguar E-type to a drag race . . . disappointing.

Horn systems (radials, sectorals, multi-cells, slant-plates, etc.) in my opinion never sounded very smooth until constant-directivity horn designs came out in the 1980s. This throws out lots of otherwise great speakers, which can sound like somebody brought a big-block Chevelle to a road race . . .

Also, the chapter of loudspeaker history marked by the ubiquity of little paper-cone tweeters (a la JBL L100, McIntosh ML-anything) is one that I'm really happy is behind us.