The LRS is a great choice for most rooms for two reasons. First, it has nearly all the best qualities of the bigger Maggies, and particular the magic midrange. It also has pretty decent bass for its size in a normal size room. With my RTA with pink noise the speaker is flat down to 80 Hz, but falls fairly quickly below that. If you are familiar with the Quad ESL-57, the LRS is essentially a Quad reincarnation tonally, but with MUCH better dynamics. Second, the speaker is "right sized’ for the room. The larger Maggies are too big for their own good, IMHO. The small ones (LRS / 0.7 / 1.7i) work MUCH better in the midrange in most normal size rooms. Imaging in particular is much improved over the big guys, which really need a large room to work geometrically. You end up sitting on top of them if the room is too small and that is not good.
Subwoofers - as Tim says, the Duke LeJuene / Earl Geddes Audio Kinesis 4-speaker SWARM is the best WOOFER system you can buy - period, for ANY room. That is because the assymetric distribution of four subwoofers around the room is the only way to defeat the room modes. (If you are not familiar with the system, read Dr. Robert Greene's review of the system in The Absolute Sound.) Room correction helps, but cannot correct for suck-out which plagues most listening rooms with one or two monopole woofers. That is true for any speaker - even the vaunted Magicos which are great but don’t work in anything short of the near field in a room typical of the Biltmore House.
Fortunately, there is a new DSP-enabled dipole subwoofer (the VPE Little Dipole Woofer - Model 1) coming out shortly which matches the radiation pattern of the small Maggies, AND solves the room mode problem via use of a true dipole radiation architecture. The recommendation is one LDW per Maggie with the back port radiating in phase and UNDER the bottom of the speaker standing up on MagnaRiser or Mye stands, and the driver radiating backwards out of phase. This provides a perfect match for the Maggie dipole pattern in the upper bass / lower midrange, and two of these woofers solve the room mode problem as well as the four-speaker Audio Kinesis SWARM does, but at half the cost. Stay tuned for more details soon.
Subwoofers - as Tim says, the Duke LeJuene / Earl Geddes Audio Kinesis 4-speaker SWARM is the best WOOFER system you can buy - period, for ANY room. That is because the assymetric distribution of four subwoofers around the room is the only way to defeat the room modes. (If you are not familiar with the system, read Dr. Robert Greene's review of the system in The Absolute Sound.) Room correction helps, but cannot correct for suck-out which plagues most listening rooms with one or two monopole woofers. That is true for any speaker - even the vaunted Magicos which are great but don’t work in anything short of the near field in a room typical of the Biltmore House.
Fortunately, there is a new DSP-enabled dipole subwoofer (the VPE Little Dipole Woofer - Model 1) coming out shortly which matches the radiation pattern of the small Maggies, AND solves the room mode problem via use of a true dipole radiation architecture. The recommendation is one LDW per Maggie with the back port radiating in phase and UNDER the bottom of the speaker standing up on MagnaRiser or Mye stands, and the driver radiating backwards out of phase. This provides a perfect match for the Maggie dipole pattern in the upper bass / lower midrange, and two of these woofers solve the room mode problem as well as the four-speaker Audio Kinesis SWARM does, but at half the cost. Stay tuned for more details soon.