chrispenycate

I more or less live in a recording/postproduction studio, so don't have a home hi-fi setup; here Ive got about four thousand watts of high efficiency speaker aimed at me from various directions; if it all gave full power I suspect I'd implode.
But the point is, what is a "best" system? One where, if you run a recording of a string quartet, or get the musicians to play in the room, half the time you're wrong about which is which? Or one where it's so similar to the room in which a film was mixed that you're hearing it just as the director intended(believe me, those are two very different conditions) Or one which rock music sounds "impressive", a sort of pseudo discotech? All are valid, mutually exclusive choices, and depend on personal taste.
Again, the room acoustics mean that different speakers, different directional patterns, will sound better or worse, for one listener or several. Nobody's going to treat their room like a studio.
Final problem; aesthetics.As a rule of thumb, big speakers sound better than little ones (there are good physical reasons for this). But, unless you have a dedicated listening room, no-one's going to put five fifteen litre cabinets into a room to listen to surround sound; if the neighbours didn't assassinate you, the wife would. So, the optimum solution is, and will always be, a compromise.