$8,000 budget--Need help

Put your system in ANY other room in your house (presumably smaller!). Then your 8K (on the used market) will get you a very good system to enjoy, at least if you are sticking to digital. New, you can still do reasonably well if you insist on going that way, but I agree you are not going to find much at CES that will suit your purposes.

How about some PA equipment? Just about every town that has a music store, be it chain or independent, will have a bulletin board that lists used PA gear. Another good source is the local trading post type paper & even the local newspaper. Used PA gear is an even greater bargain than used audio gear. With those high ceilings, you could suspend the spkrs & they would cover most of the room. I'm thinking a LCR configuration w/sub would work pretty well.

All you need is a decent front end to go with it & you're set.

“I am purchasing a new stereo system. I have a $8,000 budget to spend on speakers and equipment. I am working with a room filled with travertine that is 35 ft. wide by 55 ft.long with 18 foot ceilings. I am going to the CES Show in Las Vegas for my evaluation. One speaker line I am looking at is the Von Schweikert VR4 SR. Can anyone recommend speakers and equipment for my comparison? I listen to all types of music; soft/hard rock, pop, oldies, classical, jazz, etc. I enjoy listening to music that is very defined and realalistic. I do not mind used equipment.”

I have read the postings to your thread and have a few thoughts and an idiosyncratic solution that I have direct personal experience with.Have fun at the CES. I doubt you will find a solution but get around the rooms and ask the speaker manufacturers for their solution. You are faced with a really significant room problem and sources and amplification are not going to change that. Getting the right speaker is going to be the critical element in such a large bright room.

I’m making a few assumptions. You have probably figured out you will not get a reference sound going in this room. I assume the room will be utilised for different purposes simultaneously and may well have several functional areas. I’m guessing you may well have an area where you can enjoy ‘serious’ listening but a lot of the room will effectively be ambient sound.

My direct experience is with a ‘great’ room that was added to our house some years ago. It is approx 54 ft long by 20 ft wide with 9 ft ceilings. The room is largely surrounded by glass sliding doors, has a granite floor and little in the way of soft furnishings or carpet. The volume the speakers see is in fact a bit larger than this. The room functions as a kitchen/dining/lounge area with a service area behind the kitchen. The room is a regular rectangle.

Speaker solution is Martin Logan Monolith IIIp sitting between our lounge and dining areas firing over the dining area at the kitchen where we spend a lot of our lives sitting at the large front bench. There are several reasons why this particular speaker works better than a dynamic loudspeaker or another panel speaker in my estimation.

There are several attributes of an electrostatic panel that help in this room, namely their lesser interaction with sidewalls ceiling and floor. The perceived volume does not drop off as rapidly as your distance from the speaker increases in comparison to a dynamic speaker . The backwave from the panel provides excellent coverage of the lounge area. The level of resolution that the panel is capable of means that the music is alive at relatively low volumes.

There is a specific attribute of the Monoliths that helps and that is the lowish crossover of 125 Hz. In later ML speakers the crossover is higher and the bass is more directional.

Allied to this experience is the virtue of utilising a high resolution speaker and feeding a lot of quality power to the speakers. This is not to provide ultimate volume but to provide an involving musical experience at lowish volumes. I can assure you that you will not be listening at high volumes because the room will go completely crazy. You may well find that you listen to a lot more small group stuff rather than symphonies.

We get a surprisingly good sound in our horrible room. From the kitchen bench and the lounge area the performers are completely dissociated from the speakers to the point that a number of guests have taken all evening to figure out that the music is coming from the room dividers.A number of people with good systems have also (maybe being polite) have been surprised how well it has worked.

The other speaker that I have personal experience with are Shahinians which are a polydirectional design and could well work in such a space.

My suggestions are tailored to your specific room problem. There is nothing orthodox about the solution but you do not have an orthodox problem. If it was me I’d be on the lookout for ML CLS IIz panels (much younger than Monoliths), one of Velodyne’s digitally corrected subwoofers, high grade, high power ss amplification (Plinius, Krell,Classe etc etc) and potentially a tubed cdp with variable output.

Do not get strung out tuning a room problem with cables.

Best of luck.

Kevin .

Wow, just move the furniture and get your rackets and play tennis, that would be great. As for your speakers, I would go for: each speaker would have (2-15inch Fertin 38EX electromagnetic) and a (8 inch Fertin 20EX electromagnetic). All this in an open-baffle. There goes the 8000$, but that's hi-fi isn't it? As for the amps, I would bi-amp this set-up with David Berning mono since the Fertin are 100db into 8 ohm.That would surely rock the place. A great place requires a great set-up.

You could see a picture of the Fertin 20EX at diyaudio(Fertin project-calling all open-baffle expert).