$50k - $80k Budget…Opinions please.


Long story short, I sold my beloved 2-channel to reduce family debt. In about a year-ish, I’ll be in a position to rebuild with a hefty budget. I loved my Harbeth + Pass Labs combo. My REL sub died before I really got to integrate it, so opinions wanted there as well. I fully understand the diminishing margin of returns when moving into some arenas, but that’s ok, opinions are strongly encouraged.

I listen to a lot of Miles Davis/Coltrane, Radiohead, Tool, Pearl Jam, Brent Cobb. I’ve often preferred “organic” or neutral, not sure how technical that is.

toddcowles

Showing 1 response by lemonhaze

Start with the room.  This defines what speakers you can fit and work with.  How big is it?  How is current damping?  Can you treat it, etc...  Once that is defined I suggest selecting a speaker as your choice will be a function of the room

I'm not going to suggest what to buy as you've had lots of those. Room acoustics has been mentioned and rightly so. I agree with the above, to start with the room but not with what follows.

The room needs to be considered as a separate issue and not according to your choice of speaker. This is akin to telling a musician friend to please bring his violin to play and not his double bass because your room is too small. Huh?  It is paramount that you get your room acoustically tamed before you audition anything because you may select a component based on what it sounds like in an untreated room only to find when you add another component that you are now unhappy with both.

Treating a room can be handed over to the pro's who will endeavour to get the decay time down to a certain time, usually about 300 to 400ms. This will include absorbers, diffusers and bass traps. All this in the interest of achieving a smooth in-room frequency response. Without treatment the long decay of sound will smear and confuse the detail resulting in a congested sound.

Further smoothing can be obtained by using multiple subs. These subs can be considered as tuning devices and make, along with the room treatment, a really huge difference. I can not overstate what this brings to the party!  Needs to be heard, and you certainly have the funds to do it 😎

Now ponder this:  Take a properly treated room with multi-subs, check out 'audiokinesis' for info on his SWARM, and you have all the bass performance you need. Now a number of speaker manufacturers have a model or two below their flagship speaker that cuts cost by using fewer bass drivers, but mids and tops are identical to the megabuck flagship. This path will not only save you money but will, I say again will, outperform the flagship model simply because the subs are smoothing the bass which two fullrange speakers, hampered by their position in the room can not do.

Your speaker choice does not need to be a function of the room. The acoustic treatment will take that out of the equation to the point where you no longer have your room intruding but get to hear the acoustics of the venue. 

I did not intend to recommend any component but in this looong post the speaker brand Volti came to mind.