Hi. Thanks much for the useful insight and guidance. I admit to a certain eagerness to try something new FOMO I guess. As a start I will look to “modernize” my current speakers ... can’t hurt to try that. My concerns mainly came up when I went from tube amps to the Pass Labs. It probably does not make any sense but the coherence between the Avantgarde horns and the subwoofers became more noticeable. Also the bass got flabby/slow/less present. I tried to solve these problems with the REL’s. It helped but did not solve the issue either. The other unsolvable issue is that I am in Asia on an overseas assignment. There are only bricks and mortar stores and these only carry the biggest/most popular brands ... so Wilson, Maggie’s, Focal, Sony’s Fabre, B&W etc and some weirdly exotic and expensive Japanese brands.
High Sensitivity Speakers
Within the last year I purchased a Pass Labs XA 60.8 ... which I am pleased with. It’s a great match with the rest of my system which includes Avant-garde Uno Gen 1 speakers (sorry about the hyphen but the spell check insists). I like the speakers a lot but they are now 17 years on so I assume speaker technology has moved in quite a bit in thus time. So as I considered new speaker alternatives I discovered that the Pass Labs 60.8 (69 w class A, 120w class A/B) are “underpowered” for a number of speaker brands. I am not keen to trade my amp up but it’s an option. So looking to upgrade speakers I an looking at Avant-garde Duo Gen 3. Any input on other speaker brands that might be sensitive enough to match with the amps I currently have? I live overseas so by brand choice is a bit limited to “well known” brands. My system: SME 20/2 tt, Tom Evans The Groove phono preamp, Brooklyn + DAC, PS Audio 15 Power Plant, Joule Electra line preamp, 4 Rel 812 subs, room size 30’x21’x10’ ceiling), assorted decent power cables and interconnects.