Josh, in your experience, what was the smallest high-end speaker that you thought sounded most awesome?

With small speakers the issue is, of course, the bass, not the highs. You can stick a tweeter in any box you want but the bass is the challenge. I'm a big fan of Totem speakers. All their products are damn small and put out serious bass. Price, I think, is $1500 for their very, very small floor speaker and less, of course, for their bookshelf models. Also, PMC rocks some serious bass in small packages. Since they're from the pro market with nearfield-specific drivers, the dispersion is huge which, of course, makes them great for parties or whatever. I'm personally a big fan of hyper detailed pro monitors but, hey, whatever floats your boat. At $2k, Elac makes the 302 with the deepest bass in the smallest damn package ever. I've heard a similar Elac speaker to the 302 and thought it was very nice but, I'm told, positioning is difficult with the tiny guys and really unusual drivers. DeVore makes the Gibbon 3, 8 and Super 8 which are extremely refined sonically. They don't do the bass of the other guys but they're tiny and great-sounding. For those new here, I'd really recommend getting small speakers and not overdoing it with big bass. The biggest sin I see at shows and in people's homes is bass just way out of control. You can spend any amount of money on a great pair of bookshelf speakers and then add a corrected sub later, if you must. But don't get some huge speaker with double 12" and blow your windows out because you can never dial that bass back. But that's just my advice, others will, of course, disagree.

Interesting you should say Totem - that was exactly what came to my mind. While I should qualify that my own gear isn't super high end (NAD 304 Amp, PSB Alpha A/V Speakers, fed from my computer), the one rig I heard that really blew me away back when I was auditioning CD players was using Totem speakers. I believe they were the Model 1's, and they just had incredibly clear sound and great imaging. This was about 9 years ago, so you know they made an impression on me. However, I think the Totel Model 1 Signatures will run you close to $2k USD - they do have some lower end bookshelf models though.