Do you consider your loudspeaker perfect for your personal sonic preferences and perfect for your ears?
They are very close. I like vocals a lot and they are exceptional at this. I also like deep, natural sounding bass, and they do an excellent job with this. They also have a very deep, wide soundstage with an excellent center image. And they sound great at both low and high volumes. I tend to listen at fairly low volumes (<75db) most of the time, and I dislike speakers that you have to crank up for them to come alive.
Where they fall a little short is in dynamic slam, but this is probably more due to my amp choice (DIY 300B PSET). I absolutely love this amp for vocals and sound staging, but I suspect a high end SS amp (Gryphon, Pilium, Boulder, etc.) might provide more dynamics.
They don't have the sharpest imaging focus I've ever heard, but they aren't bad in this regard. But if I get too far off-axis, I lose the center image distinctness, but that is true to some extent with every speaker I have heard.
Do you believe that loudspeakers are the most difficult or "problematic" category of components?
I believe there is more variability in speakers than any other component and they have the most interaction with the room acoustics so optimizing performance can be challenging in some rooms. But every component affects the sound, and getting good synergy is key.
Do you believe there is such a thing as the "perfect" loudspeaker for you personally? Or is some compromise, large or small, inevitably part of the equation of every loudspeaker. (A "compromise" could be in size of loudspeaker or drive requirements or frequency balance or dynamics or transparency or any of the sonic characteristics we ever talk about.)
My speakers are big and require a fair amount of room. I'd love to be able to get this performance from a small speaker placed close to the wall behind them, but I have yet to hear any such speakers that come close to delivering the same satisfaction.
My speakers are DIY open-baffle planar-magnetic line arrays (six BG NEO10 and sixteen NEO3 drivers per speaker) with open-baffle servo woofer towers (four 12" woofers per speaker). The line arrays are ~98db/w sensitivity. I'm not sure what the woofers are, but they are driven separately by 800w Rythmik HX800 servo control amps. These are based on the Line Force designed by Danny Ritchie for Serenity Acoustics.