Affordable vs. ultra expensive speakers - what's the difference?

So this is kind of interesting.

I bought a pair of QLN Sonoras and just absolutely loved them. Very minimal simplistic design. Engineered with the less is more philosophy and they worked extremely well in my setup with the Audio Hungary Qualiton X200.

I was in Mexico San Jose visiting one of our plants, went to dinner at our plant managers home and he has a X200 with the QLN Prestige 5 in his much larger listening room. They sounded fantastic. Open, dynamic, detailed, everything my Sonoras are but more. Same design cues a bit harder to drive for lower powered amps.

I bit went from what was a perfect $5500 pair of speaker and spent $12500.00 more for the 5’s and well regretted it. They just did not work in my room. 
 

The lesson I learned in my situation is that less is more. The 5’s went back and the Sonoras are back.

Go listen and answer the question yourself.

The $50k speakers will melt your dennon receiver.

It is true that speakers must be commensurate and synergetically linked to the room...

But is is not enough at all...

A room must be treated materially but this  is not enough also...

A room must be mechanically controlled...

After a rightful acoustic embeddings the price of speakers dont means much pass a certain price of the basic components...

Acoustic rule not the box....

An acoustically  dedicated room beat any piece of gear in improvement at any price...

I bit went from what was a perfect $5500 pair of speaker and spent $12500.00 more for the 5’s and well regretted it. They just did not work in my room.

Higher price is no guarantee of better sound, which is subjective anyway, but higher cost from the builder’s perspective allows for more expensive, higher quality, more resolving, and hopefully better sounding parts. It’s still a huge challenge to synergize all the parts into a coherent, balanced, and satisfying speaker. Then there’s the critical element of finding components that will reveal the better parts of the more expensive speaker. Throwing Magico, Wilson, or Focal speakers on an generic 50 watt receiver isn’t likely to impress anyone.