One speaker that everyone likes to rave about and compare (favorably) to more expensive Hertz, JL Audio, etc components is the relatively new Hybrid Audio Imagine. It's sold online for $250 or through dealers. I got myself a set because of two reasons: (1) easily bi-amiable with a single capacitor low pass on the tweeter, by design. (2) Woofer that's designed to play very high into mid-range, preventing the tweeter interfering with the vocal frequency range too much (at least in active setup), hopefully resulting in superior imaging. I didn't mention these because it seems the OP was more interested in buying speakers that cost at least 2x less. I am not giving a full review of these because I just started messing around with these speakers. Another reason is that they seem to take their time to break in. They just run in passive mode (only one side actually) until I get around to buy all the parts necessary for bi-amp setup. In the meanwhile I am just concerned with breaking them in without listening too critically. Initial observations are cautiously optimistic. In passive mode the tweeter does seem to play a little louder than I like. The mid-range is nice and clear, open and more realistic than I heard before. Highs are fairly crisp and clear, but there is too much of the very upper end. -3dB at 14KHz seems to help it. I also feel like the tweet interfers with imaging a little by overplaying the mids. The mids can take serious beating in the low end before any signs of bottoming out. However, midbass sensitivity is lower than I like. It does seem to be slowly improving over time. I have played them for 5-6 hours only. (Recommended break in is 20-50 hours). Clearly, IMO, these speakers need a little break in and to run active to bring the best out of them. If with break-in the mid-bass sensitivity of these puppies matches say my older Alpine Type-Rs, I'd say we have a winner, because all other aspects of this speaker stands a head and shoulders above.
I do want to try out the SPR-60C woofers at some point as well (I heard their tweeters are nothing special though). They seem like very nice mids. According to Alpine engineer they utilize split gap motor and shorting rings, not to mention the new phase plug, neo magnet, and the surround. The former two were previously mostly limited to relatively high end subwoofer designs. Looking at crossover parts, it looks like their -6dB point is at 6KHz, which is to my liking. The inductor is on the woofer, so it doesn't need to use any band-pass crossovers, when not available.