I am Looking for That Elusive 3 Dimensional Room Filling Soundstage


I have heard it half a dozen times at home, small room, Primaluna HP Integrated or a Rogue Atlas Magnum II and RP-1 Pre and believe it or not a pair of close to 30 year old Paradigm Export Monitors.

The experience I had, I can only describe as sitting in an aquarium when the litlle rectangular glass aquarium was filled with liquid engulfing you from all directions with no awareness of the speaker boxes...it was just perfect!

The room is approximately 12 x 13 x 9, small bedroom converted to a den!

So the question is what speakers does everyone recommend to provide the same experience?? I have a budget of $2000 for the next little babies so let’s not talk about Focal uber expensive stand mounts at $9500 thank you!

Monitor not floor standers and the Primaluna is gone, it’s all Rogue And yes, I would consider a pair of floor standers that are not to intrusive.
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Showing 3 responses by mapman

" An important part of the puzzle is every time you add/change/delete/upgrade room treatments you must then reestablish ideal speaker locations. Sorry to be the bearer of bad gnus."

No you don’t have to  Debbie Downer, if you just do it right.

But you seem always determined to get everyone to spin their wheels, chase their tails, battle windmills and fork over money in general for useless tweaks. I guess its a living.

Well you may hate to but you just did.

From a technical perspective, streaming is a much more robust process than reading data of an optical disk (CD) in real time. All my CDs get ripped first right up front then streamed. Even off my smart phone in the car. I never "play" CDs anymore. The results are pretty much never as good as ripping. Not all CD players are created equal of course but they all face the same challenges.

Plus when you rip a CD with good ripping software (not expensive) you get very reliable metrics as an adjunct that help you determine which CDs have defects and are more error prone and which are not.

Many CDs may produce many read errors during ripping even when they may look to be in perfect condition.

However with ripping, the data can be re-read multiple times as needed until good whereas when playing a CD there is limited time for that (unless buffered up prior).

Only very few of the 1000’s of CDs I’ve ripped were so bad that they had to be ripped with errors in the resulting file. Even with those, it is still unlikely anyone will ever hear the errors that might remain with a properly done CD rip.

Streaming using a high quality service like Tidal, Qubuz, or Amazon also all share similar quality advantages over trying to play a CD in real-time yourself.


The other thing to consider is how big of a sweet spot or zone do you need for that sound stage and imaging? Choices are much more limited for that.