None of the speakers you cited were ever played one on one with a live musical source at a demo. Photographs of AR3s playing against an Aolean Skinner pipe organ were shown in advertising copy. There were others as well. AR3 produced the deepest bass with the lowest harmonic distortion of any speaker available including the mighty A7 Voice of the Theater for a long time. When the standard was accuracy, the top of the line AR speaker was the unit of choice for at least two decades. When the standard was something else such as a pleasing sound, anybody's pick was as good as anybody elses.

Camera's are equally unforgiving. That's why we use soft filters, air brushes, and special techniques such as dodging and burning in portrait photography. Reality is often not what we are looking for. An enhanced romanticized version of it is often far more pleasing. This puts the manufacturer at a clear advantage over the consumer. When no standards exist, he can invent an infinite variety of his products each time claiming the latest is better than all of his previous offerings and better than everything his competitors offer at the same price. If there is a standard which is to duplicate something else precisely, not only does each incremental improvement become more difficult to obtain, more expensive, and more difficult to justify in terms of cost, but once he achieves what most of the market would see as perfection, all he can offer is cheaper, smaller, more reliable versions of the same product. And that means a mature product with less profits.