How much to spend to beat $1200 10yr old speakers?

i've got a conrad johnson cav-50 integrated and recently picked up a sony scd ce 775 to satisfy the SACD bug on the cheap

What type of music do you listen to? What do you want to spend? Do you want to stay with monitors? Finally, why do you think you need to replace the KEFs?

i don't know if i need to replace them at all but i might consider it if the concensus is that speaker tech has come far enough in the past ten years that say $600-900 speakers will do everything better than what i have- i listen to acoustic jazz, classical, some pop and bluegrass. i'm just not sure what's out there now, but i'd certainly be ok with keeping my KEF's for a while- i like monitors but i had a chance to listen to the meadowlark swifts and liked them but it was a brief audition and not in my system- alot of the good dealers are about 110 miles away

Quads look nice. Heard them with older Arcam stuff which is sort of flat sounding. Even so, I thought they tended to be bright. Read Brit-mag review and they said could be bad with bad recordings.
Hard to find but try ATC SCM 7's (I think www.flatearthaudio.com). Also B&W CDM 1 NT, DynAudio Audience 52's.

Hello, I'm not familiar with your speakers but I still use some KEF 104 from 1976 (with updated crossovers making them 104 aB). I face same problem...I have heard the Quad 12L with some NAD amplification. Quiet nice, dynamic a bit too brigth for me. But I still enjoy more my oldies KEFS for the music I listen to: Jazz, blues, rock.
So I don't know...I was advised to add a quality sub from REL (for example). Did you think of that option ?

Olivier