Few people have even been able to listen to them, so there's that. They are notoriously hard to position, need a tremendously large room, and obscene amounts of amplification. Since they are an active 4-way system this means 4 stereo amplifiers or 8 individual mono-block amplifiers. The install I did back in the day used 8 Linn Climax Monoblock amplifiers. These were $10,000 each, so the combined cost of amplification and speakers was $120,000. I spent about 7 years in the high end audio business and also built speakers on my own for quite some time, still do. I got to hear, sell, and setup pretty much all of the best systems in the world. If you want my top speakers of all time, here's the list.



1. Sonus Faber Guarneri Homage - The one speaker I should have bought when I had accommodation pricing. The most magical 2-way on planet earth.

2. Dynaudio Special 25 - Should have bought a pair of these as well, although I do have a few sets of other awesome Dynaudio speakers.

3. Dynadio Evidence Master - Sold a pair of these at $85,000/pair. Downright amazing

4. Wilson Audio Watt/Puppy - Sold a few pairs of Wilsons including grand slams, but still like these better.

5. B&W Silver Signature - Place in my heart for these 1990s gems.



You might note that a lot of these are simpler 2-way designs. I tend to be a huge fan of this more elegant and less complex speaker type. Especially today you'll find that a well engineered 2-way speaker can dig down to 35hz or less in some instances. Trying to build a larger 3-way rarely adds any significant value. It may gain you 10-15hz on the low end, but often it just creates a much more challenging design problem, increases your volume of the enclosure, your crossover design complexity, and makes it such that if your room is too small, you've actually built something that will sound worse in your specific scenario.



My two cents for your next Nautilus build... Passive 2-way system with a totally kick butt mid/woofer. More manageable size to build this and you'll have a speaker that will be able to adapt to a number of different rooms/scenarios.