These are the 3rd best speakers I have ever heard.
1. Wilson Grand Slamm
2. Legacy Audio Whispers
3. Legacy Audio Focus

P.S. I have heard over 37 brands ranging from JM Labs (not Grande Utopia yet though), Martin Logan, Hales etc.. to (Gag!) Bose. Legacy is very good. Some idiots here seem to have some other agenda. If you don't like them a 3 or 4 is appropriate. 1 is reserved almost exclusively for Bose, don't be stupid.

Heard these on a trip to San Diego. Awesome!
They look great too, almost enough to convince the lady of the house to let me buy a pair, of course until I told here the price, "Someday" says she, but not today :( (She didn't buy the "but honey, they sound better than some 10 and 15 thousand dollars speakers I have heard")

After spending several months playing with these things, trying to get some sort of coherent, smooth and remotely musical sound out of them, I am finished. I have been beaten into submission by them.
Most of the problems are inherent design flaws which only point to a large profit margin. The overall design is akin to the Pioneer HPM series of the 1970's. More drivers, more size, more better!! The lack of thought that went into the front baffleis atonishing. The drivers are actually reversed as far as time alignment. The tweeter in the closest driver to your ears, no wonder these will not approximate a center image. This must be the only speaker on the market that has randomly mounted and countersunk drivers on the baffle. If you have ever seen a radial plot of a tweeter countersunk, then mounted to the front of the baffle, you know what I am talking about. If you haven't, read something other than Audio/Video Review!! Let's talk about pistonic area, if you dare read on. This is the main marketing idea behind these things, more area, more better.
The measurement of LINEAR excursion by a cone transucer is the other critical part of this equation. This is refered to as xmax in speaker lingo (refer to A/V
Review comment) and these two quantities are what determines "LINEAR" cone excursion. How big in area and how far out a woofer can extend is totally irrelevent when we are talking accurate musical reproducion. Fact #1 Driver response time and square wave performance diminishes with weight, transducer wall flex, and redundant/multiple driver type systems. Fact #2 A woofer can only reproduce accurate waves outside of it's resonace frequency. This means if you have a resonance freq. of 32hz your driver is not going to be able to be tuned so that it is "flat to 20hz" without having a huge rise at 32hz and surrounding frequency areas. Let's stop comparing these pretty boxes with carefully engineered products which are made by passionate people with vision. This only tells other speaker designers that if it looks good on the outside, you can put crap inside and people WILL buy them. Wilson's, Avalons and other musical transducers in this realm are serious products with unimaginable amounts of time and effort being put into their design, modeling, tuning and modification to improve their already superior quality. Five grand is alot of change for a speaker, use your money wisely.

I found these speakers forward and extremely hard to listen to. The bass is very artificial and non pleasing with solid state or tube amplification. A lot of confusion in the projection of sound. Probably has to do with the number of drivers. Imgaing is rough and no focused. Poor design is to blame. I will agree that the cabinets are pretty but the sound not matching. There are so many better products in this price range.I agree with Bryan, these speakers are what the AMC Pacer was to cars. All hype, no performance. No wonder they're mail order only. It would take a magician to make these speakers sound good. Have you ever seen the movie "Ruthless People"? These are the Dominator X1's. Bigger is truly better.

Al, I am thrilled that life is so good for you that not only can you get into a snit about speakers but also condescend to other opinions! I will not address the question of the merits of the speakers-beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. However, count the number of positive reviews and do some statistical analysis. A 4. something rating overall as an average indicates more pleasure with them than displeasure. My comments below yours were meant to inspire some objective source to review them. I highly doubt that Stereophile won't review them because they are bad. In fact I called Stereophile and was informed that it is simply a case of numbers of speakers and time and space available for reviews. I am very happy for you that you did find speakers you like, five pairs to be specific. Now, how about listening to some nice music (oh heaven forbid I should be asked to define "nice music") and chilling and enjoying the music rather than listening to the equipment. Isn't that what it's really all about? And by the way, to set the record straight, I don't smoke, take drugs or anything else but on occaision find myself transported by beautiful music from my great new speakers. I must only presume that you were caught on an off day and hope things go better for you next week.

Some background: This review is made after listening to Legacy Focus and Whisper (Elite DVD and CD Player - forgot model #, with Legacy monoblocks), Martin-Logan Aerius and SL3 (Marantz Receiver and CD Player, forgot amp and DVD player), Hales Revelation 3 and Transcendence 3 (Rotel Amp and CD Player), NHT 2.5i (Rotel Amp and CD Player), 2.9, and 3.3 (Sony 355ES CD Player and Sony TA9000ES amplifier stereo mode), Definitive Technologies BP2000, and BP3000 (Sony 355ES CD Player and Sony TA9000ES amplifier stereo mode), PSB Stratus Silver-i (Rotel Receiver + Amp, Denon DVD Player, and another config which is Bryston amp + Rotel CD Player + forgot what preamp), DynAudio Audience 40 (Krell CD Player and Receiver), Snell (forgot what model, but it's $1400 a pair with McIntosh amp + Sony 5 CD changer player), McIntosh ML4C (Marantz DVD Player with all McIntosh amp/receivers). See my other reviews on these speakers for a perspective of what I want in sound.
All the speakers above I've heard in different places/room/situations/conditions and might affect the judgement of that particular speaker, so take this with a grain of salt, and more importantly, LISTEN to them if you are interested. This is just an OPINION of mine of those speakers I've heard. Full disclosure: I haven't bought any of these speakers, but right now I'm leaning toward the NHT 3.3, since I can buy them (1 year old) at around $2500. All the speakers I've heard will either get 3 to 5 stars, since I don't believe any speakers at this price range is capable of getting 1 star (If they do, how many star is my $10 computer speaker? If it's also 1, I'm sure the speaker reviewed will be a LOT better than my $10 computer speaker). A 5 can only be awarded to live performance, and so far I haven't heard anything that sounded like live performance (meaning you can't distinguish whether an instrument sound came out of a real instrument or a speaker).

This speaker has some of the most detailed soundstaging I've heard. BTW, I am hearing this inside their factory in Springfield, IL, so I have to assume they have hooked these up as best as they could. However, the base is NON-EXISTENT. I am disappointed because of that. The other sounds are bland for my taste, they came out, but doesn't impart any 'feeling' to the music. Perhaps a better statement would be, I was NOT excited to hear music coming out from them. The material I brought consists of CD and DVD materials, and on both counts the sound just doesn't 'bring you along'. Have to say that these speakers do not strain at loud volumes, but I didn't have the remote given to me, so I didn't test further. Again, this is just MY opinion.

Why can't you stupid people spell bass? It is not Base, although some of your reviews are.

NHT stink for the price, These rule!

The people at $ensible $ound are to be trusted more than some of the goof balls here. A 1 star rating, please, leave that to Bose. I was disappointed by the Whispers, guess I expected too much. The Focus model sounded better. And no, the listening room in springfield is not optomized, I asked the guy to move them around quite a bit ( the lamp cord doesn't make sense for $6,000 and $14,000 speakers either). I also toured the rest of the buildings, nice place (but easy to miss off the side of the road like that, oh yeah visit Lincoln's house while you are the too, really cool). The drivers are assmbled there on the premises for most speakers (and they are not sourced from asia, duh!)
Just listen to them yourselves.

Also Stereophile has a rule (loose as it is) that you must have a certain amount of retail dealers to be reviewed, Eaglston was the only exception I know of to date. And Legacy has no "retail" dealers.

5 Stars sound
6 Stars value you have to spend a lot more to get this sound from others (except maybe JosephAudio)

5.5

Power, power-handling

Image confusion

Many of our reviewers are not overly-concerned with typing accuracy, and many are foreign, and several may just not care if their sentences and words are not constructed accurately.

In any case, it's nice to hear from them, whatever the print!

Don't get too snobby, 'cause then YOU'LL have to prove YOUR usage perfect. With a start like "smarten up people", this may be a challenge for YOU from the onset ...

Is that a new alternative music group, Smarten Up People? YOUR usage has me confused.

Best not to play the snob game. There's always someone more qualified out there to show you where YOU run out of correctness ...