Speakers generally are grouped by price, and generally the more you pay, the better sound you get. There is a point that paying more only increases the listening experience by a few percentage points. But I would look at very high end book shelf speakers, like Revel, Sonus Faber, B&W, I listened to the B*W recently, really like them, Paradigm Reference, I think spending $1500 to $2000 on a pair is really going to be hard to beat, I think its the Emporer’s clothes after that, but you could pay less than that if you bought on Audiogon.
Even when I sold the stuff, I was always a bit of a cheapskate. I used to bi-amp a pair of ESS AMT 1B monitors with a 400 wpc Hitachi amp for the woofers and a 100 WPC hitachi mos-fet amp for the heils. But I’m all over reasonably sized bookshelves with a sub now.
But once you start talking more than a couple hundred per speaker my eyes glaze over. I’ve hung around Difinitive audio and a few other places where amps cost tens of thousands, as do speakers. They DO sound better, but having been in live bands myself, and appreciating live music, if I want that kind of quality I go see the band live.
I used to be an audiophile until I realized that “audiophile” and “music lover” are two completely different things, though one can be both. The difference is, when playing a record or digital source:
-—A music lover listens to the music.
-—An audiophile listens to the equipment reproduce the music.
This is why I have a bunch of VERY WELL RECORDED AND PRESSED albums of crappy music from my audiophile days. It’s why I have a recording of trains and thunder. :-)
I am now a music lover with a latent audiophile gland still functioning, though very anemically. I do love the vintage equipment, though.