11-19-15: Sunnyjim
By vintage, I am generally referring to speakers from roughly 1965 to 1989. I did not want to use the word "Old" so as not to flush out any speaker. I should have added the word "venerable" to identify for us old timers in the membership, names like Bozak, Advent, AR, KLH, EPI, Rectilinear, JBL, DCM IMF, (Bud) Fried, ESS (pre-AMT tweeter and Dr. Heil).
My perception back in the day was that as a general rule of thumb (there were exceptions, of course), speakers from the 1980s tended to considerably outperform those from the earlier part of the period you cited, particularly in terms of definition, clarity, and imaging. In many cases, I suspect, due more to the cabinet design than to the design of the drivers and crossovers.
Since the original question was phrased as "what vintage speaker might **you** use today," I'll say therefore that the only speakers from prior to ca. 1980 that come to mind as some that I might want to use would be the Quad ESL-57 (of course), probably also the ESL-63, and if I wanted to invest a great deal of money and time, Tannoy or Western Electric drivers from earlier decades mounted in modern custom cabinets.
From the 1980s, though, there are a great many choices I would consider, many of them noted by the others earlier in the thread. Among those that I had occasion to hear extensively, Infinity RS-1B, Acoustat, KEF. And a lesser known one that I owned and which gave me a great deal of pleasure for a couple of decades, the Pentagram P-10 (in one of its later versions, having a different and larger dome midrange than the initial version; no relation, btw, between that speaker and the Bang & Olufsen Penta which was also from the 1980s).
Regards,
-- Al
