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Need help picking speakers for small room

First, the room: 13'x10 with low ceilings. Dry wall and carpet. Main use is home office. Placement options are limited. Speakers will have to be close to the wall and near the corners. I plan to install some acoustic panels to tame early reflections.

All my speakers are Boston VR-M series. I like the sound, but naturally want something different for this modest 2-channel set up.

I listened yesterday to Focal Element B bookshelves and Totem Forest towers connected to $10K-$20K worth of electronics. Far and beyond what I intend to spend. I wasn't blown away by what I heard. Don't get me wrong -- they sounded great, but not night-and-day better than my Bostons.

This audition reinforced my intent to spend about $1000 or less on my speakers. Most of the speakers on my list to consider (Energy, NHT, Ascend, Klipsch, Canton, B&W) are in the $700 range, and most have a frequency response of 50Hz or below.

The speakers I'm looking for should be more fun than analytic. They need to be not very fussy about placement. The should work well with a wide variety of music choices, much of it ripped lossless to my computer.

Given the dearth of dealers around here anymore (biggest family-owned chain just went belly up after 50 years) I'll probably buy over the Internet (ID, Audiogon, etc.).

As for electronics, I'm going to start by using a surplus 5-channel Denon receiver rated 75WPC. I bought it 10 years or so ago and it still works great. will replace it with a 2-channel amp when it fails or the upgrade bug bites.

What would you do in my position?
bjb_nva
riz1
42 posts
 
Check out North Creek speakers at northcreekmusic.com

They are reasonably priced and designed for small rooms and close to front wall placement.
racamuti's avatar
racamuti
362 posts
 
How about Gallo's? Very small with a big sound and you can mount them on the wall.
bjb_nva OP
3 posts
 
Thanks for all the great replies. I found a previously undiscovered dealer Sunday that set up shop in one of Tweeter's abandoned locations. They're called IQ Home Entertainment and you can google them if you're interested in the brands they carried.

I listed to a gargantuan pair of Focal's (Utopia, I think) that seriously had me considering taking out a second mortgage to afford their $20K-$30K price tag. Not really,but they sounded awesome.

But back to bookshelves. I really liked the $800-$1000 offerings from Monitor Audio and Dali. I initially favored the stronger bass response of the MA's but ended up preferring the improved detail and imaging I was hearing with the Dali Ikon 1s.

I bought the floor models for $700 (a good deal?) and set them up in a much larger room than the office they will go in next week.

Everything I liked about them is still there, but the bass is a little too dispersed in their present (temporary) location: a 26'x16' room with the speakers about 10 feet in from the corners.

The office is 13'x10' and the speaker will be installed within a foot or two of the corners, which should reinforce the bass.

I have 30 days to change my mind, so if I still feel I need a little more low end , I will probably give the Monitor Audio's a whirl.

The cool thing about the Dali Icons is they have this dual tweeter thing going for them -- a dome tweeter plus an electrostat tweeter. Very sweet highs.
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