Speakers 10 years old or older that can compete with todays best,

like @cleeds I enjoy my IRS Betas.  Had AR3a, DQ10, Mirage M3 and M1, Aerial 8b (still have them on secondary system) and the Betas which reign supreme.

Big Threshold 12e's on the bass and Manley Snappers on the mid highs!

@ghdprentice

I upgraded my Apogee Duetta II pair with new ribbons, crossovers and internal damping material, and they're better than ever.  I agree they deserve the highest quality associated equipment.  For my asymmetrical listening room and eclectic musical tastes, I don't know of a better speaker made.

For a symmetrical room, I can imagine there may be better speakers, but few cone-type speakers can produce the realistic image size and soundstaging that planar speakers can, and they are probably all very heavy and expensive.  (Although I admire fine wood, I'm OK not paying for it with a speaker.) And the Apogees don't sacrifice much in bass or other areas to achieve their fine soundstaging and imaging.  I don't think I'd want to return to cone speakers for my main system, although I tolerate them in secondary systems.

Depends on quality of said speaker; depends on conditions the speaker lived in over those 25+ years … newer hifi expensive speakers likely better, yes absolutely … the only people that will argue probably think a carburetor & cap/rotor engines get better gas mileage than modern cars … technology always gets better … the fractions or level of differences, perhaps minor.

Too many to name including most panel and Omni speakers. 
However, speaker sonics are progressing at the various price points.

@mikelavigne wrote:

my room is epic, my set-up and room tuning is epic, any sort of dsp would be wasted and regressive in my particular room and signal path. no matter the acronym.

Impressive looking setup and listening room indeed.

Not to unnecessarily stir up the "why no DSP?"-question that appears to have been aimed your way already as an option with your system, but have you - in the analogue domain with an electronic crossover - experimented with an outboard active configuration at some point? I’d also add that a DSP can act as a digital crossover only (wholly replacing a passive ditto), sans room correction, but of course that still involves the "intervention" of a conversion to and from a digital processing part.

Though you have no doubt come to a conclusion on this matter, from my chair - and with a digital source only - the use of a DSP acting as a digital crossover is thinking about the passive counterpart it replaces, and which of the two is the lesser evil. Assessing a DSP section as such comes in conjunction with the important negation of the passive crossover to offer a direct driver-to-dedicated-amp-channel connection which, in the different converted from passive to active setups I’ve heard (that is, maintaining the same main speakers), has always led to an advantageous outcome - by a comfortable mile even.

It just seems to me that many regards the insertion of a DSP (and mostly assuming it’s acting as a room correction device exclusively) without considering that it can replace a passive crossover as a digital ditto, with all that entails wrt. driver control and overall filter implementation and the elaborate settings potentially involved here. Thinking that a DSP is mainly an add-on to an existing passive setup as a room correction means, while being perhaps its primary function as they’re mostly implemented, is really only seeing it for a part of what it can do, while arguably missing out on the most important one.