@chuck I just completed a process to upgrade my speakers to end-game status. I was looking in roughly the price range you specify. I visited two stores in Portland Oregon and had a very good experience in both. I'm going to write a more complete post about my experience in a new thread but here are the main points I learned from my experience. I ended up buying a pair of Dynaudio Confidence 60 BTW.
I was replacing a pair of Thiel CS6. I loved these speakers but I wanted to see if I could do better. The CS6 has a very nice tonal balance and world class imaging. They can be a little harsh in the upper midrange/lower treble and I was hoping to fix that. I also wanted my new speakers to go deeper in the bass. I was prepared to give up some of the incredible imaging to gain SQ in other areas. I'm running a Krell KSA 300S so there is no restriction of what speaker I can drive.
My new listening room has a lot of diffusion but no special absorption treatment. The floor is thick pile wall to wall carpet. Size is 25' x 17' x 9' ceiling. I ran REW with my Thiels and the results were surprisingly good. The bass response is smoother than I expected and the decay time is around 550 ms. The waterfall plot is very good. I'm going to judiciously add some absorptive treatment to get the decay around 350 to 400 ms but my room was good enough to go ahead and procure new speakers without further effort. I follow the advice regarding speaker setup in Jim Smith's book "Getting Better Sound."
My price range was $25K to $80K, give or take. I listened to Dynaudio Confidence 50, Sonus Faber Amati G5, and Magico S5 2024 at Pearl Audio. I listened to KEF Blade 2 Meta and Wilson Audio Alexia V at Echo Audio.
Like you, I assumed that upper range speakers would tend to converge regarding their sound. What I found is the total opposite. The five speakers I auditioned were magnitudes more different than I expected. I'll give a very brief review of what I heard.
At Pearl Audio they have a listening room approximately the size of mine and they wheeled the speakers in and out for each listening session so that there was only one set of speakers in the room. Each set of speakers were set up in approximately the same location. They were all driven by Pass Class A monos.
The Dynaudio 50's were the most balanced and just sounded "right" to me. They sounded a lot like my Thiels which was a good thing. The Amati G5 and the Magico S5 were night and day. The Amati G5 had more bass than the Confidence 50. The Magico S5 had much less bass than the Confidence 50. I would characterize the Amati as quite warm (maybe even bloated) and the S5 as very lean. The difference between the Amati's and S5's was nothing short of astounding. I'm still having trouble processing the fact that those two speakers could sound that different in the same room driven by the same electronics. The midrange and treble of all three speakers I heard were good. There were differences but I think I could have been happy with that aspect of all three. The Confidence 50 had the best imaging but the G5 and the S5 were no slouch.
At Echo I listened to the Blade 2 Meta and the Alexia V. They were in two different rooms so that may have had an impact on what I heard. The incredible difference here was in the midrange. The two speakers were radically different in their presentation. The Blade 2 was very recessed in the area of vocals. Vocals were way back in the mix. The rest of the frequency range was very nice. The Blade 2 had the best bass of any speaker I heard - tight, detailed, and punchy. On the Alexia V the vocals were absolutely front and center - exactly the opposite of the Blade 2. The bass was strong and tight but not as good as the KEF and the treble was a little crisper than the Blade 2. Overall the Alexia V was my second favorite speaker behind the Dynaudio Confidence 50.
When I started this process I was leaning toward the KEF Blades from the reviews I've read and seen on YouTube but the recessed midrange is not what I expected. I'm still troubled by this. I heard the Blade 1 (not Meta) at the Pacific show in Seattle several years ago and I didn't notice that midrange characteristic. They sounded wonderful. This does not show up in the reviews either.
Buying a pair of 5 figure speakers is one of the hardest things I've ever done (my Confidence 60's were $50k). There is simply no practical way to audition several models of large heavy floor standing speakers in your home. You have to hear them at a dealer or at an audio show and hope that you can correlate your impressions to make the best decision you can. I'm still shocked that the speakers I heard could sound so different from each other.
The good news is that my Dynaudios are broken in and sound glorious. They do everything better than my Thiels, even the imaging. The sound I'm getting is perhaps the best I've heard anywhere, even the 7 figure rooms I've heard at shows, but I'm probably jaded. Let me just say that I've heard a lot of rooms where the cabling cost more than my entire system and those couldn't hold a candle to my current setup. I couldn't make it to AXPONA this year but I'm going to the Dallas show in July so I'll have a chance to calibrate what I'm hearing at home.
Sorry for the lengthy post but I hope this was helpful.
